North Dakota is booming. Its unemployment rate is the lowest in the country, 3.7 per cent, and so many people have moved there for jobs that last year local officials declared a housing crisis. The new workers have been drawn by the Williston Basin, in the western part of the state, which holds the largest accumulation of oil identified in North America since 1968, when the Prudhoe Bay field was found, on the North Slope of Alaska. Oil companies have booked motels within two hours’ drive for a year in advance; last summer, relocated workers converted the lawn of a town park into a tent city.

About a hundred new wells are blasted into the ground every month. Seen from a distance on U.S. Highway 2, the derricks form a straight crease—giants reduced to props by a landscape that the novelist Larry Woiwode described as a vast plane, “its flatness tugging the sky tight at every horizon, as if it were tied there.” One day a few months ago, beside a trailer parked near the center of the basin, half a dozen men prepared to send enough explosives underground to dismantle an armored tank. The firepower consisted of twenty-four “shaped charges”—little cone-shaped shells housed in foot-long metal cannisters called perforating guns. When the charges were detonated by an electrical signal, each shell would explode into the surrounding rock, forming corridors through which oil could flow into the well.

The workers, who were mostly in their twenties or thirties, wore hard hats, steel-toed boots, and coveralls stained to the chest with crude oil. One of them screwed four perforating guns together, attached them to a heavy wire, then lowered them into a hole bored in the ground. As the wire unspooled from an enormous drum mounted on the back of the trailer, another man, inside, used a joystick to control the guns’ descent. It took almost an hour before the guns neared the far end of the L-shaped wellbore, an underground trip of nearly four miles, and began to withdraw. A third worker knelt on the floor of the trailer like a preacher and studied a column of numbers written on a window, down-hole distances where the men were to set off the explosions: 19,971 feet, then 19,909, then 19,850. On closed-circuit radio, a voice from a trailer across the lot addressed the worker on the joystick: “Steady, keep it steady.”

“He’s got to have a doctor’s touch on that drum wire,” the engineer in charge of the well, Russell Rankin, said. Rankin, who was clean-shaven and had on a class ring and a carefully ironed golf shirt, works for Brigham Exploration, based in Austin, Texas, one of some hundred and fifty oil companies that have entered the basin since 2006. “Everybody sent up here is on the same mission, which is: Solve the puzzle of this place,” Rankin said. “We know there’s oil there. But how much of it can you get out of the rock?”

The rock is the Bakken formation, a layer of the basin that geologists believe holds a twenty-five-thousand-square-mile sea of oil. (The formation is mostly beneath the surface of North Dakota, but it extends into Montana and Canada.) The head of the state’s department of mineral resources, Lynn Helms, recently estimated that the region could contain eleven billion barrels of oil that can be obtained using current technology, nearly enough to supply the United States for two years. That assessment has doubled since a 2008 United States Geological Survey study, and the amount that will eventually be recoverable is the subject of intense speculation. “The Williston Basin is still relatively underexplored and poorly understood in terms of its geology,” Helms said. “It’s a subterranean detective story.”

A hundred and thirteen million barrels of crude oil were produced in North Dakota last year—more than five per cent of the country’s domestic output. (The U.S. produces slightly less than half of the oil it consumes.) The increase is well timed. Last month, with oil prices rising, President Obama announced the goal of reducing by one-third America’s reliance on foreign oil by 2025. But the restrictions on offshore drilling that followed the 2010 Gulf of Mexico spill have limited domestic oil production, and the disastrous blowup at Japan’s Fukushima plant last month has made an increase in nuclear power politically untenable. Meanwhile, the past two years were the first since 1991 in which domestic oil production increased, owing substantially to North Dakota’s contributions. Geologists believe that Williston could be at the beginning of a twenty-year boom.

When the perforation guns were lined up at the proper depth, the man on his knees placed his hands on a wall panel that held knobs, dials, switches, and a key in a keyhole. “Plug it?” he asked. Rankin nodded, and he gently turned the key. A few seconds later, the needles of a meter bounced abruptly. A worker who stood hugging a vertical pipe near the wellhead gave a thumbs-up, to indicate that he had felt a rumble from the faraway explosion. In the trailer, all was quiet.

Oil companies often name their wells after the family that owns the surrounding land, and, because this part of the state was settled overwhelmingly by Norwegian immigrants and their descendants, the well names have a certain uniformity of character: the Erickson, the Sorenson, the Mortenson, the Tjelde, the Bakke, the Brakken. Rankin’s new well was registered with the North Dakota Industrial Commission as the Abe, after Abe Owan, a local businessman, on whose property Brigham had already installed the Owan, the Abe Owan, and the Owan-Nehring. “Abe’s got a lot of land, and we’re starting to run out of names,” Rankin said.

Rankin is the principal engineer and overseer of Brigham’s wells in the Bakken. In 2010, he was made responsible for much of the company’s four-hundred-million-dollar budget and was put in charge of hiring all the rig contractors and work crews involved. By August, he and his wife and sons had moved from Austin to Williston. For the time being, they live in a trailer in the company’s equipment yard. Rankin considers his wells “not exactly like my kids, but let’s say close enough.” In a span of just four days a few months ago, he met with dozens of service providers—pipeline construction, solids disposal, right-of-way acquisition, electrical supply, pumping units—along with the mayor of Williston, the director of economic development, and officers of the state land department. One morning, he told everybody he hadn’t yet seen to meet him at the big table at Trapper’s Kettle for breakfast, and they took turns sitting next to him.

Rankin is thirty-eight, six feet tall, and broad in the beam. He has a high forehead and wears large eyeglasses, which together give the appearance that he is always about to ask politely if you’ve got a minute. He grew up in Marietta, Oklahoma, where his father worked as an insurance agent and his mother taught business math to middle-school students. He liked fossils: “I was always picking things up on camping trips—small crustaceans, because Oklahoma was once a shallow sea, during the Cretaceous period.” He wanted to become a military pilot, and applied to the Air Force Academy, but his vision wasn’t good enough. “The people who don’t see well, they usually make them into computer programmers, so I got an engineering scholarship to the University of Oklahoma,” he said. “Pretty quickly, if you’re studying engineering in Oklahoma, the oil companies come for you.”

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An out-of-town oilman in North Dakota can be met with a degree of suspicion, and Rankin says that the people he meets often “expect J. R. Ewing in a designer suit and cowboy boots, with a big-shot belt buckle.” But he retains the deferential manner of a mid-level petroleum engineer. Sometimes, on the way to an appointment, he’ll check his reflection in the car mirror and declare, “That’s good enough for the girls I go with.”

At Brigham’s headquarters, in Austin, Rankin’s superiors regard his earnestness with amusement, smiling at one another when he enters a brief meeting armed with giant maps, delineated by seismography, topography, and land-ownership. He is so compulsive about the execution of his wells that, before the ground is broken, he has all the thirty-foot joints of steel pipe that will make up the wellbore stacked neatly in the order that he plans to install them—from one to seven hundred, give or take. Brigham is gambling a great deal on the success of these wells. It has acquired the rights to nearly four hundred thousand acres in the Williston “play,” as oil prospects are called, and has a roster of more than a thousand new wells to drill between now and 2021. “Since the end of 2008, we’ve moved about ninety-five per cent of our money out of projects in Texas and the Gulf Coast and into the Williston Basin,” Ben (Bud) Brigham, the company’s founder, said. “We’ve kind of taken the all-or-nothing position.”

Around noon on April 4, 1951, Andrew (Blackie) Davidson, the drilling superintendent on a wildcat well east of Williston, set fire to a rag and flung it in the air. He watched as its trajectory met an invisible stream of natural gas that emanated from the ground, sending a flare thirty feet into the sky; by nightfall, it could be seen ten miles away. There was oil in North Dakota.

This was the state’s first producing well, the Clarence Iverson No. 1. Davidson had been sent up from Oklahoma by Amerada Petroleum, and he and his crew became local heroes. “I never thought I’d be so important in my whole life,” Leon (Tude) Gordon, who bottled the state’s first pint of oil, recalled. “Blackie and I could’ve run for mayor if we’d wanted.” Time devoted a cover story to Amerada’s find, and by the end of the year prospectors had secured leases on almost two-thirds of the land in North Dakota. The Clarence Iverson No. 1 recovered nearly six hundred thousand barrels in the next three decades, and enabled Clarence Iverson himself, the wheat farmer who owned the land and the drilling rights beneath the well, to “pretty much retire” at the age of forty-four, his son Cliff told me. Of his parents’ activities since then, Cliff said, “They went to visit their relatives in Minnesota is about all they done.”

More discoveries followed, and several formations within the Williston Basin were identified as oil-bearing zones. But, because the world was then running a surplus of crude oil, the state imposed strict quotas on North Dakota’s wells. “We have oil running out of our ears,” an Amerada executive said at the time. Later booms worked out no better. In 1973, panic over the OPEC embargo set off another short-term drilling bonanza, and a large share of the local population took jobs in the oil field. “The second boom was bigger, but it ended much worse, because of all the locals who decided to join up,” Ed Grandbois, an equipment salesman in Williston, told me. “When the companies pulled out, a lot of people said, ‘I’m leaving, and if I can get a steady job I’m not coming back.’ ”

In Elwyn Robinson’s definitive “History of North Dakota,” the author notes a recurring pattern of geographic disappointment: the land has always fallen short of people’s expectations. Early settlers mistook the subhumid Missouri Plateau, which occupies the western half of the state, for the same fertile ground that was being farmed successfully in the East. The state was built virtually overnight by overeager railroad lines and by Minnesota’s flour-milling corporations. They brought prosperity, but also higher land prices than many farmers could afford. All of it created resentment; the state was a “colonial hinterland” of the Twin Cities, Robinson wrote, its resources and citizens “patronized and belittled.” The population, estimated at sixteen thousand in 1878, grew to almost six hundred thousand by 1910 and has remained more or less constant ever since.

In 1953, J. W. Nordquist, a geologist for Phillips Petroleum, established that there was oil in a three-hundred-and-sixty-million-year-old formation which he named for the Bakken family, whose farm, near Williston, was the site of his discovery. He took note of the formation’s unusual, three-tiered composition, which he characterized as “an Oreo cookie”: sandwiched between two layers of black shale was a thin and elusive layer of dolomite, where the oil lay. But for decades the Bakken was ignored. The shale was considered too “tight,” or lacking the adequate porosity, to justify the expense of drilling.