Because there is very little to do in Dickinson, North Dakota, one of the things that I do regularly for entertainment is read the local, U.S., and World news.  You would think that since I spend so much time reading the news, that I would be well-informed, but I’m not.

For my local news, the news affecting Dickinson, I read the Dickinson Press Newspaper online several times a day.  I count on the Dickinson Press to let me know about important news concerning Dickinson, particularly what is happening in the oil field, because this affects me and everyone else in Dickinson.

Recently, when I chose to read the World and U.S. news articles selected for sharing by Google, I found some very important information that I never, ever got from the Dickinson Press Newspaper, any other newspaper in North Dakota, or any television station in North Dakota.  For example, the existence of the Haynes and Boone Oil Industry Reports giving complete up-to-date listings of all the U.S. oil companies and oil field service companies that had filed for bankruptcy.

After quickly looking through the free, online Haynes and Boone Oil Industry Reports, I was able to quickly see which oil companies and oil field service companies operating in North Dakota had filed for bankruptcy.  I didn’t know that Key Energy, Weatherford, and Nuvera had filed for bankruptcy, no one told me.  Does anyone else in Dickinson know?  This is something that the people in Dickinson would need to know, but I never saw it on the television news or read it in any newspaper in North Dakota.

Today, I was looking at the U.S. news articles that Google was sharing, and I saw one titled “Here’s Why Whiting Petroleum’s Stock Plummeted Toward A Record Low”, published by MarketWatch.com on February 12.  If that headline isn’t startling enough, you should see the content of the article.

I will include a link to the full article below, but here are some of the main points of the article from MarketWatch.com:

“Shares of Whiting Petroleum Corp. plunged in volatile trading toward a record low, after a Debtwire report that the oil-and-gas company had engaged with advisers in an effort to find ways to refinance the large amount of debt coming due over the next year.

The stock WLL, -22.37%  lost over half its value (down 51.2%) to an all-time intraday low of $1.81, before paring gains to be down 22% in active afternoon trading. Trading volume was 48 million shares, compared with the full-day average of about 10.2 million shares.

In a sign of how rapid the decline and bounce was, the stock was halted for volatility three times on the way down, and twice on the way up.”

When I read this MarketWatch.com article further, I saw something that was even more shocking to me, the Whiting Petroleum stock price had fallen by 89% in the past twelve months, from up around $30 per share to less than $5 per share.  Here is the link to the full article https://www.marketwatch.com/story/heres-why-whiting-petroleums-stock-plummeted-toward-a-record-low-2020-02-12

Whiting Petroleum, along with Continental Resources and Marathon Oil, is one of the largest oil field employers in Dickinson and western North Dakota.  This kind of information should probably be headline news in the Dickinson Press Newspaper, but I haven’t seen it.  Maybe the Dickinson Press Newspaper is trying to stay away from this kind of news, because it would cause panic in Dickinson.

For many people in Dickinson, including Whiting Petroleum employees, they may have had a great deal of money in Whiting Petroleum stocks.  Imagine owning 10,000 shares of Whiting Petroleum stock valued at $300,000 less than a year ago, and during trading today this same 10,000 shares of stock sank to as low as $18,000.

I am going to schedule this blog post to be published Thursday morning, but later Thursday or perhaps Friday, I am going to write about my personal feelings concerning this calamity.