Oil creating ‘overnight millionaires’ in N.D.

Wealth brings bling to the prairie, but folks vow to stay true to their roots

BEULAH, N.D. - Oscar Stohler was raised in a sod house in western North Dakota and ranched there for nearly seven decades. He never gave much thought to what lay below the grass that fattened his cattle.

When oilmen wanted to drill there last year, Stohler, 83, doubted oil would be found two miles underground on his property. He even joked about it.

"I told them if they hit oil, I was going to buy a Cadillac convertible and put those big horns on the front and wear a 10-gallon hat," Stohler recalled.

He still drives his old pickup and wears a mesh farm cap — but it's by choice.

In less than a year, Stohler and his wife, Lorene, 82, have become millionaires from the production of one well on their land near Dunn Center, a mile or so from the sod home where Oscar grew up. A second well has begun producing on their property and another is being drilled — all aimed at the Bakken shale formation, a rich deposit that the U.S. Geological Survey calls the largest continuous oil accumulation it has ever assessed.

‘Overnight millionaires’
Landowners in western North Dakota have a much better chance of striking it rich from oil than they do playing the lottery, say the Stohlers. Some of their neighbors in the town of about 120, from bar tenders to Tupperware salespeople, have become "overnight millionaires" from oil royalty payments.

"It's the easiest money we've ever made," said Lorene Stohler, who worked for decades as a sales clerk at a small department store.

State and industry officials say North Dakota is on pace to set a state oil-production record this year, surpassing the 52.6 million barrels produced in 1984. A record number of drill rigs are piercing the prairie and North Dakota has nearly 4,000 active oil wells.

The drilling frenzy has led companies to search for oil using horizontal drilling beneath Parshall, a town of about 980 in Mountrail County, and under Lake Sakakawea, 180-mile-long reservoir on the Missouri River.

"I have heard, anecdotally, that there is a millionaire a day being created in North Dakota," said Ron Ness, president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council.

Kathy Strombeck, a state Tax Department analyst, said the number of "income millionaires" in North Dakota is rising.

The number of taxpayers reporting adjusted gross income of more than $1 million in North Dakota rose from 266 in 2005 to 388 in 2006, Strombeck said. The 2007 numbers won't be known until October, she said.

Incomes on the upswing
Bruce Gjovig, director of the University of North Dakota's Center for Innovation, said his informal survey estimates the number of new millionaires in Mountrail County, one of the biggest drilling areas of the Bakken, may be as many as 2,000 — or nearly a third of the county's population — in the next three to five years.

North Dakota's per capita income in 2007 was $36,846, ranking the state 30th in the nation and up from 42nd in 1997, said Richard Rathge, the state Data Center director and North Dakota demographer.

"The two main drivers are energy and agriculture income," Rathge said. The increasing wealth in the state from oil should push the average annual wage in North Dakota, he said.

The oil boom has spurred several "Jed Clampett-like" tales of ordinary folks getting rich, said Tom Rolfstad, the economic development director for the city of Williston.

Rolfstad said he hasn't spotted any Ferraris or Rolls Royces in town, though several people can afford them now.

"I'm seeing a lot more big, shiny gas-guzzling pickups," he said.

Staying true to their roots
Several homes that cost more than a million dollars also are being built in Williston, he said. The community of about 12,500 people is perhaps best known as the hometown of NBA coach Phil Jackson.

Most people "don't want people to know how much money they got and they don't want to be tagged with being wealthy — they want to be themselves," Rolfstad said.

Oscar and Lorene Stohler said their newly found wealth hasn't changed them.

"We still know what tough times are," Oscar said. "We grew up in the Dirty '30s."

"We put our kids through college without that oil money," Lorene said.

The couple moved a few miles east to Beulah and paid cash for their new home, the first one they have owned. They have established trust accounts for their four children.

Lorene said the only thriftless purchase was an automatic sprinkler system for her flowers that surround the couple's new home. And Oscar bought a $1,000 ring for his wife to celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary.

"We got enough now to buy new stuff," Lorene said, "but we like our old stuff."

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Save Money by Watching the Watts

Monitoring the power that my gadgets suck up, and making a few changes, helped me to be greener--and cut my bills.

We use a lot of electricity at my house, a drawback to being technology obsessed. In the interest of going at least a little bit greener, I set out to measure (and to reduce, I hoped) the power usage of my various home-office computers and peripherals during a typical workday. What I discovered was, uh, shocking.

To begin my testing, I picked up the Kill A Watt from P3 International, a $21 product that lets you measure the amount of power a given device uses. Then I perused my $75 electricity bill and discovered that the power company charges me roughly 11 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) for the first 333 kWh we use per month. (I also learned that the price per kWh goes up slightly for the next 100 kWh we use, and then it rises dramatically once we pass the 433-kWh mark--which we commonly do.) Armed with my new gadget and a little pricing knowledge, I headed for the power strips under my desk.

The good, the bad, the insatiable
My company-provided Dell notebook sips responsibly from the power trough, consuming an average of 29 watts while in use and 20 watts with a dark screen (now set to occur after five minutes of inactivity). Standby pulls a mere 1 watt, and powered off it's a perfect 0. When I work at home, I use the notebook to monitor my e-mail, and the screen is dark half the time. I then shut it down after a nine-hour workday. In the end, I'm happy to pay roughly 2 cents a day to run this notebook.

My home-built desktop shows less restraint, drawing an average of 145 watts during typical use (though heavy video-card use can cause that number to spike up to 100 watts higher). In standby the unit pulls 6 watts; turned off, it still draws 3 watts. In the past I rarely powered it down, so I paid about 38 cents per day ($140 per year). Now I set the PC to enter standby mode after 25 minutes, and I shut it down at night, which should cut my cost by roughly half. My savings fall short of those from the Energy Star 4.0-rated "Green PCs" that the PC World Test Center saw recently, but they're a start.

I run two 22-inch flat-panels. One is an Acer that draws 37 watts while in use and 0 watts in standby and off; the other, a Westinghouse, pulls 43 watts while in use, and 1 watt in standby and off. For a nine-hour day with no standby, the cost is 8 cents. By setting the monitors to go dark after 10 minutes of inactivity and by turning off any power-wasting screen savers, I expect to keep my cost here at under $30 per year.

My other two must-run devices are my Scientific Atlanta cable modem (6 watts) and my Netgear router (4 watts). With various devices accessing these 24/7, I'm willing to pay roughly 3 cents per day to run them continuously.

I'm less inclined, however, to feed my Klipsch speakers and HP all-in-one printer continuously. Idle, the printer pulls 12 watts, and even in power-saving mode (or off) it sucks down 6 watts. Worse, the speaker rig draws 16 watts when silent, goes up slightly at moderate volumes, and rises a bit more at concert-level decibels. But the power switch is virtually inaccessible, and I never turn them off.

So I attached a power strip to the underside of my desk--where I can easily access the power switch--and plugged in the printer and speakers. Now both pull 0 watts until I decide to use them.

No change proved particularly difficult--we'll talk about my power-guzzling, always-on home server another time--but every little bit helps. It feels good to be a bit more green, and to save a little green on the power bill.

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Climate change creating havoc, islanders say

Assistance sought for those already hit by Pacific storms, rising sea level

ALOFI, Niue - Climate change is wreaking havoc in the small island states of the South Pacific and assistance is needed for those already hit by rising seawater and severe storms, an islands leader said Wednesday.

Pacific Islands' Forum chairman and Niue Premier Toke Talagi said the frequency of severe cyclones and rising sea levels meant the challenge of climate change is no longer a matter of scientific theory.

"The evidence is quite clear that climate change is already wreaking havoc here," he said as he opened the annual summit of 16 nations.

Rising waters have forced villagers inland on four low-lying island groups in the region — Vanuatu, Kiribati (where two uninhabited islands disappeared under water in 1999), Tuvalu and the Cantaret Islands in Papua New Guinea.

Two people died when powerful winds from Cyclone Heta hammered Niue in 2004 and waves swept through villages perched atop cliffs, wrecking homes, the local hospital and other buildings.

"We shouldn't wait until a worse human catastrophe occurs before acting," Talagi said.

The international attention now focused on climate change "presents an opportunity for the region to negotiate and secure tangible assistance for people already affected by climate change," he said.

'Climate change is not science fiction'
United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said Wednesday that the U.N. and the Pacific state of Samoa are working to establish a Climate Change Center to coordinate support for Pacific Island countries to combat the impact of global warming in the region.

"Climate change is not science fiction. As your countries know all too well, it is real and present and your communities are facing the adverse impacts everyday," he said in a statement to the summit.

Earlier, representatives from the forum's seven small island states called for the completion of a deal for the bulk purchase of oil products to decrease energy costs for the mini states. Greenhouse gas emissions from oil products are a contributory source of the atmospheric warming that has helped trigger climate change.

Also Wednesday, South Pacific leaders denounced Fiji's military ruler for snubbing the summit and said measures would be discussed to pressure the coup leader to return the island nation to democracy. Forum rules do not allow for the expulsion of a member.

The stern rebukes came after Fiji's leader, Commodore Frank Bainimarama, announced Monday he would boycott the meeting, complaining that Fiji was being pressured to hold elections too soon after the bloodless coup he staged in December 2006.

Earlier this month the coup leader postponed promised March 2009 elections.

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd called Bainimarama's boycott a "direct and deliberate slight," and said measures must be taken in response to his "contempt for democracy."

New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark likened the situation with Bainimarama to that of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and the Commonwealth.

"It seems a little like the dance we went through with Zimbabwe and the Commonwealth. ... Mr. Mugabe left rather than face his peers," Clark told reporters.

In a statement sent to 15 other government leaders at the summit, Bainimarama said if the forum continued to insist on Fiji holding elections by March 2009 — a pledge he made to leaders at their 2007 meeting — then Fiji could leave the grouping.

"I will be compelled ... to tell the people of my country that they must now be prepared to suffer more sanctions, and international isolation as we pursue ... a better, more durable democracy," he wrote.

The summit will consider a report from six regional foreign ministers who visited Fiji in July. The report said only a lack of political will was delaying elections in the country, which has had four coups since 1987.

Bainimarama attacked the report, which has not yet been made public, saying his government was "dismayed and disappointed" by its contents.

The 16 nation Pacific Islands Forum comprises Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, the Cook Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, Nauru, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, the Marshall Islands, Samoa, the Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.

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