After watching its oil industry dwindle for decades, Utah is suddenly seeing a burst of activity that it hopes will make it the next North Dakota. The push is being led not by global energy titans, but smaller companies that have honed their techniques looking for oil in places like North Dakota’s Bakken Shale. These companies are now moving quickly here to snap up leases and bring advanced drilling techniques like hydraulic fracturing and horizontal wells to Utah’s boom-and-bust oil patch. But the surge in oil drilling in places like Vernal has drawn the ire of some in the state’s far-larger tourism-and-recreation industry, which doesn’t want more drill pads and oil-tanker trucks in the spectacular scenery of the high desert. No one would have imagined such a dispute just a few years ago, when most here thought the sagebrush-covered hills of eastern Utah were largely out of fresh […]