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How the shale boom came to North Dakota — and how it’s spreading west
How the shale boom came to North Dakota — and how it’s spreading west
It really is an apt image: a series of briefcases, presumably in a range of colors from dusty brown to black, sitting in the freezing air on the steps of a North Dakota courthouse sometime before dawn. The briefcases served as proxies for the oil and gas company representatives jostling to buy mineral rights in the empty flatness of western North Dakota, representatives not eager enough to close the deals that they would stand in subzero temperatures.
Williston, North Dakota, in 2008.
This scene leads the New York Times Magazine’s overview of the state’s newest-but-not-only oil boom, the cacophonous hustle to split apart the Bakken shale with hydraulic fracturing. The Times has been on a North Dakota bender of late, covering gender issues and infrastructural strains caused by the boom. But this most recent piece provides the most insight on how the boom came to be and how long it might last.
They have been through this before, the people of North Dakota, first in the ’60s, a decade after oil was discovered in the state. And then again in the late ’70s, when the boom was driven by rising oil prices. Monthly oil production, which peaked in 1984 at 4.6 million barrels, fell to half and then went sideways for nearly a quarter-century. By February 1999, there wasn’t a single rig drilling new wells in the state, and oil development looked to be yet another cautionary tale in the familiar boom-and-bust history of the region …
And then around seven years ago — driven by technological refinements that have made North Dakota a premier laboratory for coaxing oil from stingy rocks — the state’s Bakken boom began in Mountrail County. … The first areas of the Bakken to be hydraulically fractured were on the Montana side of the Williston Basin in the Elm Coulee Field, where oil was discovered in 2000. Early treatments there were called “Hail Mary fracks” because geologists and engineers would just drill a well, pump in frack fluid and pray for a robust result. The technique is more exact now. Certain grades of sand or sometimes proppant made of ceramic beads are matched to certain kinds of rock, and the wells are fracked in stages, as many as 40 stages per well.
Just how much oil is in the Bakken is still unknown. Estimates have been continuously revised upward since a 1974 figure of 10 billion barrels. Leigh Price, a United States Geological Survey geochemist, was initially greeted with skepticism when, about 13 years ago, he came to the conclusion that the Bakken might hold as much as 503 billion barrels of oil. Now people don’t think that number is as crazy as it seemed. …
[A]s the volume of oil in the Bakken shale is still a moving target, and recovery techniques are increasingly sophisticated, some estimates put the life of the Bakken play, and the attendant upheaval it is causing in North Dakota, at upward of a hundred years.
A century. Even after global climate change has brought about massive disruption, we could still see people in the badlands of North Dakota drilling holes and squeezing water into shale.
The Times suggests that the state is sanguine about the prospect, and takes its current growing pains and environmental scarring in stride.
[O]il development, and fracking in particular, raises little of the hue and cry it does in Eastern states sitting above the natural gas in the Marcellus shale. Even a well-publicized investigation by the news Web site ProPublica that reported that there were more than “1,000 accidental releases of oil, drilling wastewater and other fluids” in North Dakota in 2011 passed without much fuss.
A more typical attitude is represented by Harold Hamm, chief executive of Continental Resources. “Why do [critics] always start talking about the challenges?” Hamm said in a speech he gave at Williston Basin Petroleum Conference in Bismarck in May. “What challenges? Spending all the money?”
Hamm — who, you’ll remember, advised Mitt Romney’s campaign on energy issues during last year’s election – would likely find different answers to his questions in Colorado or California. Both states are struggling to draw a line on oil exploration that embraces the money but also addresses the all-too-real challenges.
The Denver Post reports on the debate in Colorado:
The battle over oil and gas leasing on public lands in the West is being most fiercely fought in Colorado, where in the past five years, nine of every 10 acres offered for drilling have been protested. …
The volleys of protest from communities, wildlife officials and environmental groups are sparked, they say, by an inadequate analysis of drilling impacts in the state and insufficient protection of public lands.
Bureau of Land Management officials in the state use decades-old planning documents in determining the suitability of a location for drilling — a fact that opponents have latched onto, asking that drilling be stopped while the BLM develops new planning documents. The outdated documents have halted several planned lease auctions.
Lease-sale parcels were … deferred in the area near Dinosaur National Monument, in Moffat County, after protests by the Wilderness Society and the National Parks Conservation Association. …
Parcels were also deferred from the North Fork Valley in response to criticism that they were on steep slopes or too near a school, water supplies or public land being considered for recreational use.
“It is nice that they addressed some of the concerns we raised,” said Jim Ramey, director of Paonia-based Citizens for a Healthy Community, which opposes leasing in the North Fork.
“But the fundamental problem remains that they are making decisions based on old documents that don’t reflect what is happening in Colorado,” Ramey said.
A separate article in the Times on this topic outlined the concerns of one Colorado rancher:
“It’s just this land-grab, rape-and-pillage mentality,” said Landon Deane, who raises 80 cows on a ranch that sits near several federal parcels being put up for lease. Because of the quirks of mineral ownership in the West, which can divide ownership of land and the minerals under it, one parcel up for bid sits directly below Ms. Deane’s fields, where she has recently been thinking of sowing hops for organic beer.
“All it takes is one spill, and we’re toast,” she said.
Monterey Shale in Southern California.
Likewise, California’s Monterey Shale is inspiring furious debate over extraction. The Times outlined the debate in a story this weekend, with oil companies in the country’s fourth-largest producing state facing off against environmental organizations fiercely determined to protect its legendary quality of life. We’ve outlined Gov. Jerry Brown’s plans to regulate fracking before, but not reported on the scale of the issue:
Comprising two-thirds of the United States’s total estimated shale oil reserves and covering 1,750 square miles from Southern to Central California, the Monterey Shale could turn California into the nation’s top oil-producing state and yield the kind of riches that far smaller shale oil deposits have showered on North Dakota and Texas.
It will take more regulation and persuasion to overcome objections in California and Colorado than it has in North Dakota. But the pressure to unleash the boom is immense. For oil companies, figuring out how to navigate the politics of less-receptive states is worth an enormous amount of money. At least in California, one aspect of the push will be easier: At no point in time will industry lobbyists need to seek refuge from the cold.
Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.
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How the shale boom came to North Dakota — and how it’s spreading west
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North Frackota’s population boom means more young men — and more problems
North Frackota’s population boom means more young men — and more problems
Click to embiggen.
Last year, the North Dakota division of tourism unveiled an ad as part of a series that it hoped would lure people to the state. “Drinks, dinner, decisions,” the ad copy read. “Arrive a guest. Leave a legend.” Reaction to the ad (which you can see at right) was fast and strongly negative. The image of two men leering out a window at a group of women in short skirts struck many as sexist, tone-deaf, and worse.
It turns out that the ad’s subtext may have been more accurate than we knew. From the Times:
At work, at housing camps and in bars and restaurants, men have been left to mingle with their own. High heels and skirts are as rare around here as veggie burgers. Some men liken the environment to the military or prison.
“It’s bad, dude,” said Jon Kenworthy, 22, who moved to Williston from Indiana in early December. “I was talking to my buddy here. I told him I was going to import from Indiana because there’s nothing here.”
This has complicated life for women in the region as well.
Many said they felt unsafe. Several said they could not even shop at the local Walmart without men following them through the store. Girls’ night out usually becomes an exercise in fending off obnoxious, overzealous suitors who often flaunt their newfound wealth.
Reuters / Jim UrquhartOil industry worker Bobby Freestone enjoys a day off at a so-called man camp outside Watford, N.D.
North Dakota is the fastest-growing state in the country. Fracking the Bakken Shale formation for oil has brought thousands and thousands of young men to the state, given them good salaries, crammed them into whatever housing they can find. It has also created a massive imbalance in the number of men to women in some parts of the state — and the men that have arrived are young and bored.
Prosecutors and the police note an increase in crimes against women, including domestic and sexual assaults. “There are people arriving in North Dakota every day from other places around the country who do not respect the people or laws of North Dakota,” said Ariston E. Johnson, the deputy state’s attorney in neighboring McKenzie County, in an e-mail.
Over the past six years, North Dakota has shot from the middle of the pack to become the state with the third-highest ratio of single young men to single young women in the country. In 2011, nearly 58 percent of North Dakota’s unmarried 18-to-34-year-olds were men, according to census data. That disparity was even starker in the three counties where the oil boom is heaviest — there were more than 1.6 young single men for every young single woman.
The Times article includes a graphic showing those states with the highest imbalance of single men to single women. The top five states — Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Oklahoma, and North Dakota — are all among the states with the highest levels of oil and gas exploration.
That imbalance is no excuse for sexism, assaults, or harassment. It is, however, another sign of a region strained by a booming fossil fuel industry — a region that receives very little support from that increasingly rich industry to deal with the problems that are created.
Come to North Dakota, a new, more accurate ad might beckon. Instead of being at a bar, it’s in front of a fracking rig, and instead of two guys, it will show six. And it won’t show three young women, but one — with a nervous expression on her face.
Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.
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North Frackota’s population boom means more young men — and more problems
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Keystone XL wouldn’t use top-of-the-line leak detection, because that would be no fun
Keystone XL wouldn’t use top-of-the-line leak detection, because that would be no fun
There are a lot of great things about running a huge metal tube filled with toxic sludge across the middle of the country and down to the Texas coast. There are the several dozen jobs that would be created, for one, and the scads of money earned by the Canadian tar-sands companies. And there are probably others, though I can’t think of them right now.
Well, I can think of one. The best thing about building Keystone XL (which is what we were talking about) is that it would create 1,897 miles along which anything could happen. It’s like Whac-a-Mole, trying to figure out if and where the pipeline might rupture — with the bonus that if it does rupture, any number of actual moles will be smothered in thick oily goo. And TransCanada is trying to make the game as fun as possible, by proposing to build the pipeline with relatively lax protections against leaks.
First one to spot a leak wins a prize.
From Inside Climate News:
The leak detection technology that will be used on the Keystone XL, for instance, is standard for the nation’s crude oil pipelines and rarely detects leaks smaller than 1 percent of the pipeline’s flow. The Keystone will have a capacity of 29 million gallons per day–so a spill would have to reach 294,000 gallons per day to trigger its leak detection technology.
The Keystone XL also won’t get two other safeguards found on the 19-mile stretch of the pipeline over Austin’s aquifer: a concrete cap that protects the Longhorn from construction-related punctures, and daily aerial or foot patrols to check for tiny spills that might seep to the surface.
Experts interviewed by InsideClimate News estimate it would cost less than $10 million–roughly 0.2 percent of the Keystone’s $5.3 billion budget–to add external sensor cables, a concrete cap and extra patrols to the 20 miles of the pipeline in Nebraska where a spill would be most disastrous.
So if you notice if the soil on your Montana ranch has suddenly turned black and sticky and is giving off fumes that cause you to pass out every 10 minutes, count up how much tar-sands oil you’ve got. If it’s 293,000 gallons or less, shrug and enjoy your new highly flammable lifestyle. (Is tar-sands oil, a.k.a. diluted bitumen, actually flammable? Let us know, rancher!)
I’m not a politician or a lobbyist or anything, but it seems to me that improving leak detection could earn a certain company from Canada a little bit of goodwill. “You know what,” this company could say (I’m referring to TransCanada), “we’ve decided that we’re going to go that extra step to ensure that we’re not destroying your drinking water.” That might not assuage the concerns of all Nebraskans, but the company can use all the support it can get.
They don’t, of course, because adding additional sensors is like cheating at Whac-a-Mole, and TransCanada is a stand-up, morally forthright company. Back in October, it had a spot of fun when it found an “anomaly” on its existing tar-sands pipeline and shut the thing down for a bit. That was exciting. But the all-time champion at tar-sands Whac-a-Mole is Enbridge, who — after only 17 hours! — spotted a massive leak that killed innumerable wildlife.
Save pipeline Whac-a-Mole. Oppose stronger protections for the Keystone pipeline. After all, we need something to do with our time before the atmosphere is so choked with carbon dioxide that we have to move to tropical northern Saskatchewan. Might as well stay busy hunting for pipeline leaks.
Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.
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Keystone XL wouldn’t use top-of-the-line leak detection, because that would be no fun
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Oil companies polluting aquifers with EPA’s blessing
Oil companies polluting aquifers with EPA’s blessing
Kind of like this, but underground.
Oil companies: They’re kind of like pet cats, it turns out. They don’t care what you want, they’re only out for themselves, and they love to bury their waste wherever they feel like it. And thanks to the Environmental Protection Agency, they’re able to bury it via aquifer injection at hundreds of sites across the country where the EPA says the water is not “reasonably expected” to be used for drinking.
In some of America’s most drought-stricken communities, this practice is polluting what little drinkable water there is left. A new report from ProPublica digs into the EPA’s spotty record on issuing exemption permits for dumping in the nation’s precious aquifers — starting with the fact that the EPA itself hasn’t kept great records on which permits it has issued at all.
Federal officials have given energy and mining companies permission to pollute aquifers in more than 1,500 places across the country, releasing toxic material into underground reservoirs that help supply more than half of the nation’s drinking water. …
Though hundreds of exemptions are for lower-quality water of questionable use, many allow grantees to contaminate water so pure it would barely need filtration, or that is treatable using modern technology.
The EPA is only supposed to issue exemptions if aquifers are too remote, too dirty, or too deep to supply affordable drinking water. Applicants must persuade the government that the water is not being used as drinking water and that it never will be.
Sometimes, however, the agency has issued permits for portions of reservoirs that are in use, assuming contaminants will stay within the finite area exempted.
In Wyoming, people are drawing on the same water source for drinking, irrigation and livestock that, about a mile away, is being fouled with federal permission. In Texas, EPA officials are evaluating an exemption for a uranium mine — already approved by the state — even though numerous homes draw water from just outside the underground boundaries outlined in the mining company’s application.
Wyoming, Montana, Utah, and Colorado have been hit with the most pollution exemptions. Those same states are digging deeper to get at cleaner water, looking into pipelines to pump it in from elsewhere, and/or just still drinking the possibly contaminated stuff. Thirsty Texas communities are considering pricey desalination efforts while the EPA has granted upwards of 50 aquifer exemptions throughout that state.
Most of the exemptions have gone to small, independent companies, but you will not be even a tiny bit surprised to learn that multinational energy giants Chevron, Exxon, and EnCana hold 80 of the permits between them.
To the resource industries, aquifer exemptions are essential. Oil and gas drilling waste has to go somewhere and in certain parts of the country, there are few alternatives to injecting it into porous rock that also contains water, drilling companies say. In many places, the same layers of rock that contain oil or gas also contain water, and that water is likely to already contain pollutants such as benzene from the natural hydrocarbons within it.
Similarly, the uranium mining industry works by prompting chemical reactions that separate out minerals within the aquifers themselves; the mining can’t happen without the pollution …
“The energy policy in the U.S. is keeping this from happening because right now nobody — nobody — wants to interfere with the development of oil and gas or uranium,” said a senior EPA employee who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject. “The political pressure is huge not to slow that down.”
But ProPublica also reports the EPA has “quietly” assembled a task force to reconsider the agency’s policies on aquifer exemptions given the rising value of water.
And at least judging by the EPA’s records as provided to ProPublica, there’s no clear trend of aquifer exemptions being handed out with increasing frequency. Permits took a huge dip in the late ’90s and early ’00s, then rose to about 75 annually, then dipped again last year.
Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for
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Senate works to bring dead polar bears into the U.S.
Senate works to bring dead polar bears into the U.S.
This is what a polar bear looks like, in case you don’t own a dead one.
Here is what the Senate is debating today. From NBC News:
Sportsmen might soon have more access to federal lands and be able to bring home as trophies 41 polar bears killed in Canada before the government started protecting the animals as a threatened species. …
The polar bear provision would allow the 41 hunters — two from the home state of Montana Sen. Jon Tester, the Democratic sponsor of the bill — who killed polar bears in Canada just before a 2008 ban on polar bear trophy imports took effect to bring the bears’ bodies across the border. The hunters involved were not able to bring the trophies home before the Fish and Wildlife Services listed them as a threatened species. …
Tester said it would just allow a few people who have polar bear trophies stored in Canada to finally bring them home. “These polar bears are dead, they are in cold storage and we know exactly who they are,” he said when the bill first came to the floor in September.
It is expected that Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) will vote for the bill, given his long-standing enthusiasm for killing polar bears.
Source
Bill to give hunters, fishermen more land access, NBC News
Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.
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