The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

WILLISTON, N.D. AND WINNIPEG – In the icy parking lot of the Wal-Mart in Williston, N.D., the next wave of economic refugees is washing in, counting down the hours until they can turn their back on a past they’d like to forget.

On one chilly day in December, there’s the family from North Carolina, which has crammed mom, dad, teenage son and two dogs into an old Winnebago, driving some 3,000 kilometres in hopes of finding work. And there is Eric Larsson, who has come more than 1,000 kilometres from eastern Idaho in a truck loaded with tools, looking for a job after his position vanished – along with his house – three years ago. He’s pulling a trailer he just bought so he can have a place to sleep.

“I pretty much spent $10,000 on a wing and a prayer to get here,” he says.

These people, and thousands of others whose stories bear a striking similarity, have come to join the frenzy – by plane, by ratty truck, by train. Williston, with a population of around 20,000, was a quiet North Dakota town, surrounded by oil fields that had been in decline for decades.

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The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

WILLISTON, N.D.— The drilling rigs puncture the horizons and tuck into the valleys of the bald North Dakota landscape. Their steel towers have taken root on a tableau of badlands and treeless plains that extends for more than 100 kilometres.

They are like steeples in the French countryside, erected in ever greater numbers, more every month, by an industry whose only deity is oil. Near many are the flares, the votive candles of the hydrocarbon age, where natural gas not worth enough to save is burned in enormous fireballs, some the size of small cars, so brilliant they blind drivers at night.

Cutting through it all are the roads – paved, gravel, red rock – that carry the rumbling parade of trucks, some burdened with supplies for the rigs, others with the oil they have prodded from the earth.

This is the place the energy companies call the Bakken, an oil play that has erupted across a forgotten corner of the U.S. It is a frenzy of drilling and pumping and moneymaking.

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The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

CALGARY— Half-a-decade before TransCanada Corp.’s  Keystone XL ran into a wall of political and environmental resistance, a key stretch of the route linking Canada’s oil sands to refineries in the southern U.S. emerged as a tricky, though seemingly surmountable, problem.

The route crossed a landscape of prairie and farmland, far from mountains, tundra, permafrost and other features that make it tough to dig trenches and lay pipe. But there was one obstacle.

Engineers working for another proposed pipeline project called Altex closely examined a route similar to Keystone XL’s and identified a trouble spot. Glen Perry, a pipeline entrepreneur who steered Altex, remembers the warning he received from an engineer in 2006.

“I said, ‘What are the route issues here?’ He said, ‘There’s really only one.’ I said, ‘What’s that?’ He said, ‘You have to go through the boiling sands of Nebraska.’”

Boiling sands are areas where sandy soil is so thin that groundwater can bubble up through it to the surface.

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