Lack of pipelines leads to wasting of natural gas in North Dakota drilling

Bloomberg/Fuel Fix:

Towering flames atop oil wells break the inky darkness in the badlands on North Dakota’s Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. The flares of natural gas set grass fires on the prairie where Theodora Bird Bear’s ancestors hunted buffalo and create a driving hazard on rural roads.

“At nighttime, clouds of gravel dust from semis are lit up with flaring lights,” said Bird Bear, 62, who can see flames shooting from a well behind land where she grows red beans, corn and squash. “It’s a hellish scene.”

Twice as much natural gas is wasted through flaring than in 2012 amid an energy boom that’s propelled North Dakota’s torrid economic growth. The state’s employment expansion has been the fastest in the U.S. for four years. In the rush to exploit the Bakken shale formation, which holds the nation’s second-largest oil supply, companies from Statoil ASA to Whiting Petroleum Co. are stepping in to try to capture more of what’s lost.

Oil exec: Decades of life left in Bakken Shale

Natural gas burned in flaring is a byproduct of crude oil. Without enough pipelines to transport the gas, or the refinery capacity to process it, about a third of what’s released each day, worth $1.4 million, goes up in smoke. Tribal members say as much as 70 percent of gas from wells on the reservation is flared.
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As a polar vortex weather pattern caused a nationwide propane shortage this winter, energy companies in the Bakken flared gas rich in propane. On a percentage basis, more gas was flared in the state than in any other domestic oil field and at a level equal to Russia and twice that in Nigeria.
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I thi9nk Big Green is partially responsible for this waste and pollution.  By blocking pipelines they make it uneconomic to do something more useful with this by product of oil drilling.  If they thought that blocking the pipelines would lead to less drilling they were completely wrong.  There policies are making the air dirtier.