North Dakota and Saskatchewan towns have different takes on oilsands boom
The Bakken oilfield that includes southern Saskatchewan and North Dakota contains an estimated 577 billion barrels of oil, and production is expected to top one million barrels a day by this summer in North Dakota. This ranks Bakken as one of the most prolific oilpatches in the world, second only to the Alberta oilpatch in North America and number 2 behind Texas in the United States.
Getting at the oil - with reserves equal to Saudi Arabia - is made possible with new horizontal drilling and high-pressure "fracking" that frees the oil from rock.
On the Saskatchewan side, oil production hit a record daily average of 473,600 barrels a day last year, and the trend is accelerating.
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