The folks at CNN/Money have been running a series of stories about life in Williston, ND, ground zero for the Northern U.S. energy boom.  Last week it was this story about how local strippers can make more money than pole dancers in Las Vegas. This week comes a report about how local college kids are finding the lure of six figure truck driving jobs impossible to resist, putting their education on hold or slowing it to a crawl.

‘My students make twice my salary’

Jim Stout, an English professor at Williston State College in Williston N.D., started losing some of his best students to the oil fields last year.

It was too hard to compete: The students could either spend thousands of dollars on a college education or earn $100,000 a year working on the rigs, performing maintenance on oil wells or driving trucks.

“At some point they decide, ‘Well, college will always be here … but the oil boom won’t,’” he said.

One engineering student dropped out of college last winter to take a job boiling the water used in hydraulic fracturing. In just two weeks, he made $5,000, according to Lance Olson, a science instructor at the college.

With an extreme housing shortage, some suspect that a recent spike in enrollment at Williston State was due to oil field workers taking the minimum number of class credits in order to qualify for inexpensive student housing.

We were through there last fall and had a heck of a time finding a hotel room. With hunting season now in full swing, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s not a single hotel room available in the whole state during the entire month of November.

Yesterday’s move by the International Energy Agency to coordinate the release of 60 million barrels of crude oil from SPRs (Strategic Petroleum Reserves) around the world – half of it coming from the U.S. – continues to be debated and the growing consensus seems to be that it is a new form of economic stimulus with the bonus effect of punishing speculators, Sen Ed Markey (D-MA) below noting an alternative definition for the acronym SPR.

As for the current situation constituting an “emergency” (recall that the last two SPR releases occurred during the 1991 Gulf War and after Hurricane Katrina in 2005), the opposition party seems to think that the only real emergency is a political one for the Obama Administration.

Bloomberg reports that the International Energy Agency has coordinated the release of 60 million barrels of crude oil from stockpiles around the world, half of it coming from U.S. reserves, in order to lessen supply constraints and bolster a struggling global economy.

Oil tumbled to the lowest price in four months after the International Energy Agency said its members would release crude from strategic reserves.

Oil fell as much as 6 percent as the agency announced the release of 60 million barrels to help make up for a Libyan supply disruption. The IEA said 2 million barrels a day would be available in the first 30 days. Commodities and equities tumbled after U.S. jobless claims rose last week and the Federal Reserve cut its economic growth outlook yesterday.

“The big driver is the IEA number,” said Stephen Schork, president of the Schork Group Inc. in Villanova, Pennsylvania. “There’s been a constant string of negative news about the economy and a lack of direction from Washington, which makes for a very volatile market.”

Since it was founded in 1974, this is only the third time that the IEA has taken such an action, the first being the 1991 Gulf War and the second following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. IEA Executive Director Nobuo Tanaka said in a statement, “I expect this action will contribute to well-supplied markets and to ensuring a soft landing for the world economy”.

While the former will no doubt improve, I wouldn’t be so sure about the latter…