A Merry Fracking Christmas In The Oil Patch

WILLISTON, North Dakota—In an eight-trailer mancamp tucked into a frosted fold of rolling prairie above an ice-laced lake, Chord Energy’s derrick hands, roughnecks, and roustabouts are ready for Christmas. For them, it’ll be another Monday, another 12-hour shift, another day of drilling two miles deep and three miles wide below the 3-acre Patterson 806 rig, where fracked shale oil is siphoned into surface wells to the ceaseless cadence of pumpjacks—their mallet-nosed horse heads hammering air on snow-spotted slopes shared with grazing Black Angus cattle. “I’ve been out here for the last four Thanksgivings, Christmases, and New Year’s,” said Dallas Moore, 38, a father of three from Casper, Wyoming, who on Dec. 21 was on day 32 of a 44-day stint at Patterson 806, about 15 miles east of Williston in North Dakota’s Bakken Play....