At Home in the Petromodern Paradox

Boomtowns are difficult places to live. North Dakota, long familiar with oil’s boom-and-bust cycle, became the epicentre of an extraordinary rush in 2008: towns doubled in size almost overnight, and community life was transformed by extraordinary wealth, but also by strain and conflict.

Kyle Conway traces the most recent boom within a longer North Dakotan history – from the arrival of settlers in the late nineteenth century, through mid-century oil rushes in the 1950s and 1970s, to the explosive growth after 2008. The book focuses on Williston, the commercial centre of the Bakken Formation, a vast shelf of oil-soaked shale made profitable through hydraulic fracturing, which drove a population surge between 2008 and 2014. Alongside opportunity came traffic jams, housing shortages, and tension between newcomers and longtime residents. Amid this upheaval, people devised new ways of living together, often rooted in care, hospitality, and the resilience of those who had weathered previous transformations.

Drawing on interviews, historical records, data analysis, and his own lifelong ties to the region, Conway shows how the petromodern paradox – the logic of solving the problems created by oil with more oil – fuelled both opportunity and conflict at ground level in a community transformed by oil exploration. At Home in the Petromodern Paradox asks what Williston can teach all inhabitants of an oil-fuelled world about the contradictions of petroleum dependency and offers a fragile but real sense of hope.