North Dakota’s oil industry is turning to Ukrainians to fill jobs amid a workforce shortage
— Maksym Bunchukov remembers hearing rockets explode in Zaporizhzhia as the war in Ukraine began.
“It was terrible,” he said. He and his wife sent their adult daughter west to Lviv for safety and joined her later with their pets.
Now, about 18 months after the war broke out, Bunchukov is in North Dakota, like thousands of Ukrainians who came over a century ago.
He is one of 16 new arrivals who are part of a trade group’s pilot effort through the Uniting for Ukraine humanitarian program to recruit refugees and migrants during a workforce shortage. Twelve more Ukrainians are scheduled to arrive by Aug. 15 as part of the North Dakota Petroleum Council’s Bakken Global Recruitment of Oilfield Workers program.
Some workers want to bring their families to North Dakota while others hope to return to Ukraine.
“I will try to invite my wife, invite my daughter, invite my cat and invite my dog,” Bunchukov told The Associated Press a week after his arrival.
The Bakken program has humanitarian and workforce missions, said Project Manager Brent Sanford, a former lieutenant governor who watched the Bakken oil rush unfold during his time as mayor of boomtown Watford City from 2010 to 2016.
The oil boom initially was met by an “organic workforce” of western North Dakotans with experience in oil field jobs elsewhere, but as the economy reeled from the Great Recession, thousands of people flocked to the Bakken oil field from other states and even other countries to fill high-wage jobs, Sanford said.
Technological advances for combining horizontal drilling and fracking — injecting high-pressure mixtures of water, sand and chemicals into rocks — made capturing the oil locked deep underground possible.
“People came by planes, trains and automobiles, every way possible from everywhere for the opportunity for work,” Council President Ron Ness said. “They were upside down on their mortgage, their life or whatever, and they could reset in North Dakota.”
But the 2015 downturn, coronavirus pandemic and other recent shocks probably led workers back to their home states, especially if moving meant returning to warmer and bigger cities, Sanford said. Workforce issues have become “very acute” in the last 10 months, Ness said.
