The text for today recounts that for many years, the hot pursuit of oil in Texas caused operators to overlook natural gas reservoirs, choosing instead to flare the casing head gas at a rate that permitted nighttime reading. From 1935 to 1951, “gas was the Cinderella of fuels, the forgotten stepchild of oil.” Sixty years later in North Dakota, natural gas still hasn’t found its fairytale.
In September 2011 the New York Times reported that 100 million cubic feet of natural gas was being flared in North Dakota daily. That’s enough to heat 500,000 homes for one day. Though our reading seemed to say that such practices were old hat, North Dakota continues to burn around 30% of our natural gas as waste. And globally, we’ve got good company. Russia, Nigeria, and Iran are keeping at it too. Michael Webber at the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy at the University of Texas at Austin jabbed that “North Dakota is not as bad as Kazakhstan, but this is not what you would expect a civilized, efficient society to do: to flare off a perfectly good product just because it’s expensive to bring to the market.” Yes, it seems asinine to burn as waste a product that is precious to our residents in the winter months, but that “just because” dollar sign has proven to be a compelling reason to continue lighting up the sky until very recently.
Harvesting natural gas is an infrastructure-intensive process. Since the Bakken boom, companies have begun building and expanding gas producing plants to supplement oil production. Some see a particular profit incentive in the propane and butane saturated gas found in the state.
CBS reported last month that Oneok Partners LP of Tulsa, Okla. finished construction of a gas processing plant near Watford City. Brad Borror, the company’s spokesman promised that eventually the plan would process up to 100 million cubic feet of natural gas a day.
Still, a huge push is needed to reduce flaring to 10% in the next few years, a goal of the North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources. Alison Ritter, a spokeswoman for the department told CBS that it will take about $3 billion in infrastructure improvements to get us there.
With a hefty price tag (Hess Corp. is looking to spend $325 million to expand its natural gas plant in Tioga) plummeting prices aren’t offering much of an incentive. According to the Washington Times, the price of natural gas sunk back to a 10-year low on Wednesday after Exxon Mobil and other energy companies declined to cut production. With only minimal state regulations and none from the feds, it appears that the stigma of keeping up with the Kazakhs may be our only motivation to stop ignoring the “Cinderella” of fuels.
Sources:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/27/business/energy-environment
http://www.cbsnews.com
http://www.washintontimes.com/news/2012/feb/1/economy-briefs
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