You do not even know enough to get it right.
No discovery was made in the Bakken.
It was how to exploit it. And allowing pipelines to be constructed and environmental restrictions dampened certainly help exploit as timelines changed and costs were reduced.
There is a confidence factor that includes Trump's actions by industry.
It will not make any difference to you.
A Never Trumper will never admit Trump did anything anyway.
Do you need a donation for bullets for that rifle?
Hello.
I am a wellsite (exploration) geologist.
I worked my first Bakken vertical well in 1980--it was a fluke.
I worked my first Bakken Horizontal well in 2000.
I worked horizontal Bakken wells for fifteen years, did exploration work in the DJ, Permian, Paradox Basins and in Nevada for a bit, and am now back working Bakken/Three Forks wells again.
While the Bakken was known to produce in spots on the Nesson Anticline and the Billings Nose (structural features in the Williston Basin), what was yet to be discovered was this: that the Bakken would produce in much larger areas of the Basin, including the
Elm Coulee Field in Montana, independent of structural considerations, so long as it had been charged with oil. That the Sanish Sand, in a relatively limited area of a downthrown fault block near the town of Sanish, ND, just below the lower Bakken Shale would produce, had been known since the late 50s, from vertical well production. That the Three Forks formation, underlying the Bakken in most of the Basin would also produce wasn't known, not until we started drilling horizontal wells in it, too. That the second bench of the Three Forks, where shows had been noted in vertical wells but not produced, would produce in parts of the Basin was not known until we put some laterals in it as well. That there was a lot of experimentation with everything from drilling techniques, tools, well configurations, rig design, etc. in order to exploit the discovery is a matter of record, and it has been great to have been present through all of it.
So you can act as if there was no discovery, but we'd all laugh you out the door. There were plenty of discoveries, the biggest being the concept of a true unconventional reservoir, where the hydrocarbons were distributed throughout a very large area of relatively low porosity and permeability regardless of structure, and that properly done, that could be produced at a profit. That concept is being used worldwide to produce oil and gas today.
As for development, it was continuing anyway, it just required more (and better) rail cars. Loading facilities were handling much of the oil being transported out, albeit the railroads and oil companies were coming under fire for a few rail accidents, not the least the Lac Megantic screwup and a couple of others, but in spite of those mishaps, nearly a million barrels of oil were being transported by rail, and much still is.
Trump put an end to the farce that was the "water protectors protest" holding up completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline, and that is now carrying a half million barrels of oil per day out. 90% of the people arrested in conjunction with those protests were from out of State, and that crap included three incidents where enclosures were broken into and active pipeline valves tampered with. The operators caught the action and shut down the lines before damage could occur.
The other area where Trump has helped is where there are multiple permits required on the relatively small area under Federal Control in the Williston Basin in order to construct feeder pipelines to gather oil and gas from wells on Federal (BLM) land. These are Obama/Democrat holdover regulations designed to make it more difficult for those who obtained the myriad permits to construct drilling locations, access roads, etc. and drill wells to actually produce them. Coupled with limits on flaring gas (a byproduct of oil production), and being unable to transport that raw wellhead gas to processing facilities via feeder pipelines (which require even more permits to construct), production would have to be severely choked back or halted--hard to make money that way. So all that is being cleared up.
But to act as if Trump, a relative newcomer to the scene, is the only reason or way this oil is being produced is utter nonsense. To act as if there was no discovery made, when the USGS almost annually has revised producible oil reserves upward is folly.
Some of Trump's policies have facilitated getting that oil to market, which removes discounts and acts as incentive for increased production and continuing development (beyond enough production to hold the leases), and that has streamlined the process of getting that oil to refineries.
Might I note, the Bakken 'boom' started quietly in Montana about the turn of the century, picked up in North Dakota about 2006, and continues to this day. Prior to that, however, Bakken oil production was a relative rarity, written off as nonproductive.
