The sun is rising on northwestern North Dakota, casting mottled light across the prairie and the faces of an army of oil workers. Some are ending shifts, others are just beginning. The rising light touches lines of tractor-trailer trucks clogging the roads and thousands of oil derricks nodding in the fields. And it also lights the construction crews who are racing to expand highways, extend utilities and build the facilities that an invasion of oil workers and their families requires.
Like the sun, the state's economy is rising, too, fueled by an ocean of oil freed by hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking." Recent improvements in the technique and horizontal drilling make previously inaccessible oil and natural gas recoverable. As of March, only Texas was producing more oil than North Dakota.