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North Dakota is Burning — And You Can See it from Space

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On the NPR blog, Robert Krullwich noticed that pictures taken at night from space of the US show a recent phenomenon — one of the brightest patches is in one of the least populated places in the US — western North Dakota.

The reason, apparently, is the boom in oil drilling. In addition to the lighting that the drillers bring with them, the drilling makes extensive use of the practice of burning off natural gas.  Those flares have turned this relatively underpopulated area into an area as bright as major metropolitan areas, such as Minneapolis-St.Paul.

You can find the NPR article here.

North Dakota permits burning off the flares with out taxing the natural gas burned for the first year of drilling, but, as the piece notes:

On the other hand, says Peter Lehner, blogger for the Natural Resources Defense Council, every day drillers in North Dakota “burn off enough gas to heat half a million homes.” North Dakota law says that flares are subject to taxes and royalties after one year, even if the gas isn’t being sold. But critics suspect that the state keeps granting exceptions.


Categories: General.

/ 29 Comments

29 comments

  1. auron renouille

    I’m on the fence about the whole fracking business but this is pretty awful.  So, so wasteful…

    On a technical level, is there a reason that they are unable to harness this energy?  Do you know?  I’ve got KOPB on my iPhone right now so I may yet find out if it airs this morning here.

  2. dear occupant

    When oil comes to the surface, it often brings natural gas with it, and according to North Dakota’s Department of Mineral Resources, 29 percent of the natural gas now extracted in North Dakota is flared off. Gas isn’t as profitable as oil, and the energy companies don’t always build the pipes or systems to carry it away

    what an incredible waste.

    get the oil and everything else be damned.

    thanks for this diary, ITSCS.

  3. wordsinthewind

    gas is routinely flared because transmission lines for gas have not been built. But then there are not enough transmission lines to carry the electricity produced in our many wind farms. At any given time only about half the windmills are producing. There have been many tax incentives for building wind farms but none for building the transmission lines so none of our wind farms are likely to meet their actual potential.  

  4. Chris Blask

    A while back we had a discussion about coaland how we get off it. I did a bunch of math at the time and wasn’t happy with the results (despite an error or two that made it look a bit worse). The net is that energy is a Big Deal and infrastructure timelines make it hard to turn on dimes.

    So the annual spend on electricity is something like $340B.  As half of that is coal, that comes to $170B/year. If all coal could be replaced by natural gas (the cleanest alternative that a coal plant might be converted to) at current fuel costs that would add $340B to the national consumer spend, or about $1,000 per person per year ($3.4T over ten years, or three times Healthcare Reform, with no direct reduction in other costs).  Include the cost of plant upgrades and you get something higher.  If the demand drove natural gas prices higher (this would imply a 250% increase in US demand for natural gas, so that is reasonable) and that would have to be factored in as well.

    Replacing coal with renewables would require a 1,400% increase in capacity, from 3.6% to 50% of renewable generation capacity. If the cost of electricity produced by those means was the same as coal, you just have to factor in the cost to build all that capacity and amortize that over the 20-30 years forecast by the DOE for these systems (wind at least, others may be better or worse).  

    Coal produces about 150 Terrawatt/hours of electricity, and at least this link shows creation of wind energy sources at $4,800/Megawatt hour, so to replace all coal with wind would have a capital cost of maybe $720B ($4,800/MWHour * 150,000,000 MWHours).  Colorado added 700 MWHours of wind power between 2006 and 2007, so assuming that all 50 states had the same capacity for wind power they would each have to add 429 times that much new capacity per year for ten years to replace coal.

    A more recent graphic on electricity use by type can be generated at the Energy Information Administration’s Electricity Data Browser:

    Coal power has come down while natural gas has gone up since I wrote the above in 2010. But replacing coal with zero-emmission fuel (wind, solar) still has a gulf to cross of staggering size.

    How we manage to create and use energy without causing other problems is an issue we will be working to resolve far beyond my lifetime.  

  5. Paradise50

    …who inherited his grandfather’s “worthless” wheat farm land in North Dakota.  Well they found oil.  He now has two wells on the land that give him a nice $12,000 in income each month…

  6. akmk

    showing that area sometime.

    North Dakota, however, may be slowing activity in Alaska right now, because costs of resource extraction are so much higher in Alaska.

    So, as an Alaskan, I’m grateful.

    Folks in North Dakota, however, not sure what they think.

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