The Issue of Flaring: North Dakota's Modern Day MacGuffin

This story at PennEnergy does not cite the author, but it must have been sent in by the Bismarck Tribune. Just a hunch.

As companies continue developing the plentiful shale oil and natural gas resources in North Dakota, the state has seen a dramatic rise in the amount of gas that does not make it to market, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Over the past six years, natural gas production has nearly tripled in North dakota, reaching more than 485 million cubic feet per day, with the development of the Bakken shale formation using previously unavailable extraction methods.

Much of this production boom, however, has followed the development of oil resources in the region and the necessary infrastructure for utilizing and transporting natural gas - namely pipelines - has not grown as quickly. As a result the percentage of natural gas wasted through flares and other means of disposal has risen from around 10 percent through the first half of the last decade to more than 35 percent today, peaking above 40 percent in early 2009.

Just to keep things in perspective: a) the US is awash in natural gas; it hardly missed the natural gas from North Dakota; b) the Bakken is an oil field; not a natural gas field; the natural gas coming from the Bakken represents four (4) percent of the hydrocarbon economic values of the Bakken; and, c) natural gas is a natural by-product of oil production.

This is not rocket science.

Even if is an issue, it will be resolved over time. North Dakota does not allow operators to flare gas from a well for more than a year.

The whole issue is a red herring.

Like the Ogallala aquifer, the issue of flared natural gas is a modern day MacGuffin.