Part One of multimedia journalist Jason Spiess’ interview with Brian Sullivan, “Power Lunch” Co-Anchor
Jason Spiess: Just so we can get some context for the interview. Tell me about your first trip to the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota.
Brian Sullivan: First trip to North Dakota was 2013 when things were really heating up. We wanted to go see how Williston and the Bakken region was dealing with the boom. I’ve been through this business enough to have seen some booms, like the Internet boom. Sadly I’ve been doing this now for over 20 years in financial journalism.
I wanted to see how they dealt with the boom and met some key players and spoke to some locals. It was a classic growth story of ‘we can find enough of this’ or ‘find enough of that’. I’ll never forget one of the cool anecdotes from that Bakken trip, I stayed at this hotel, which you’ll have to forgive me because I forgot the name, but now it is a Ramada. I think it was sold (after that Bakken trip). Anyway, it was on a dirt road because the hotel developer wanted to put the thing up but the town was slower than the developers because there was so much growth happening. So I have this rental car on sort of driving on this dirt driveway. (laughs)
This was a brand new hotel and it was nice, but it was also like $400-a-night. I was shocked by not only the level of growth, but the level of cost. How much everything cost. It was just shocking. We were up there for about 2 days, then we came back to the studio and returned to the oil fields in December of 2014.
For the network’s “Crude Reality: State of Pain” series, CNBC “Power Lunch” (M-F, 1PM-3PM ET) Co-Anchor Brian Sullivan and CNBC Special Correspondent Scott Cohn will visit states that once benefited from the country’s energy boom but are now finding themselves in a downturn due to the fall in oil prices. Over the next month, Sullivan and Cohn will travel to North Dakota, Alaska, New Mexico and Louisiana to talk with local businesses to see how they are handling the hard times and what they have planned for months and years ahead.
Brian Sullivan is co-anchor of CNBC’s “Power Lunch” (M-F, 1PM-3PM ET) and the host of “Talking Numbers.” He also writes for CNBC.com and the recently re-launched CNBC PRO.
He joined CNBC in May 2011 and is based at the network’s Global Headquarters in Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Sullivan has more than 15 years of financial broadcasting experience, having served as an anchor at Fox Business Network and prior to that as producer, reporter and anchor at Bloomberg Television.
He has twice been nominated for the prestigious Loeb Award. One for being recognized as among the first financial journalists to highlight the risks of the housing bubble in 2007, and the other for the 2013 CNBC documentary “America’s Gun: The Rise of the AR-15.” Prior to joining Bloomberg in 1997, Sullivan traded chemical commodities for Mitsubishi International.
Sullivan has a B.A. in political science from Virginia Tech and a law degree from Brooklyn Law School. In 2015, he began a three-year term on the Alumni Board of Virginia Tech.
In his free time he is an avid race car driver with two SCCA divisional championships.
Follow Brian Sullivan on Twitter @SullyCNBC.
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