Insight on Business

February 2013

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insight on CONSTRUCTION By Connie Fellman SERVICES Booming Business K evin Heiting was home for the holidays, back in Appleton where his parents and two brothers live. But after taking a couple weeks to relax, he was hard at work again in his new home, Minot, North Dakota. "I moved out here last April, but I've been working on the projects here since the first of the year (2012)," says Heiting, a business development representative for LongVANS Mobile Office and Storage Solutions out of Freedom. Heiting is part of a burgeoning workforce fueled by the North Dakota oil boom, with a pipeline leading directly to northeast Wisconsin's c o n t r i b u t e d b y K e v i n H e i t i n g , L o n g VA N S North Dakota oil fuels New North economy economy through local companies like LongVANS. The manufacturer of portable office trailers, storage containers and housing units has seen a mushrooming demand for their products and services with the unprecedented building boom in North Dakota spurred by the oil industry. "We're all over the state from Fargo to Minot," says Heiting. The North Dakota oil boom is an ongoing process of extracting oil, mainly from the Bakken rock formation, which covers 200,000 square miles in parts of western North Dakota, Montana and Canada. Oil was discovered there decades "If a customer calls in the morning with an immediate need for a containerized housing unit, we can have it there by the end of the day. We build them here and send them there." –Mark Diedrick, sales manager at LongVANS 42 | Insight • F e b r u a r y 2 013 Freedom's LongVANS is one of several New North companies benefitting from the oil boom in North Dakota. The company has provided the area with mobile offices, like this three-unit grouping in North Dakota, offering sameday delivery to the fast-growing area. Some Wisconsin companies are paying for their workers to commute to the area. ago, but it wasn't until recently that advancements in technology allowed drillers to effectively tap into the huge reservoir of oil and natural gas buried thousands of feet below the earth's surface. The horizontal drilling process, hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," involves blasting millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals at high-pressure deep underground to create fractures in the rock, releasing the flow of oil or gas. The process has drawn controversy and debate between those concerned about environmental impact and those seeking American oil independence. w w w. i n s i g h t o n b u s i n e s s . c o m

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