Burning a Million Dollars a Day

Across the country there's been a lot of controversy over opening up new natural gas fields to fracking, as the technology makes it possible to extract gas from places not feasible till now. Drillers have been madly opening up new fields, often without regard to environmental consequences or if they can make a profit in a market flooded with cheap natural gas.

Meanwhile, in North Dakota oil drillers are flaring off a million dollars a day worth of natural gas:

"People are estimating it's about $1 million a day just being thrown into the air," says Marcus Stewart, an energy analyst with Bentek Energy. Stewart tracks the amount of gas burned off — or flared — in the state, and his latest figures show that drillers are burning about 27 percent of the gas they produce.

Natural gas is frequently associated with oil deposits (you see methane flares at oil drilling sites all the time), so this shouldn't have been a surprise. 

Part of the problem is the energy industry's focus. As drillers arrived to tap the riches of the Bakken shale formation under western North Dakota, they were looking for oil, not natural gas.

Now that they've found gas, it's taking time and money to build the pipelines and processing plants to use it. Meanwhile, infrastructure for the oil rush needs to be built, too, and oil prices are relatively high, while natural gas prices are really low. That means companies are investing in oil infrastructure first.

"Where would your emphasis be?" asks Ron Ness, president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council. "If you've got a barrel of oil that's worth $95 and you've got [1,000 cubic feet] of gas ... that's worth $4.25, which infrastructure would you build first?"

The oil companies are being sued by mineral rights owners who should be getting royalties from this natural gas. They could simply wait until they developed the necessary infrastructure to handle all the gas and oil. But instead they're pumping oil out as fast as they can, shipping it in completely inadequate rail cars that explode in giant fireballs.

In their haste to get that oil out right now, the oil companies don't care that they're screwing mineral rights owners out of millions of dollars in royalties. They don't care that they're pumping millions of tons of CO2 into the air, completely wasting natural gas at a time when utilities are advising customers to turn their thermostats down to 60 degrees and avoid using gas appliances. They don't care that people are dying and towns are burning because their oil can't be safely transported.

And these same oil companies are telling us that global warming isn't real, that climate scientists are promoting climate change theories in order to get research grants. Through their dark money channels conservative groups like the Koch brothers and Exxon Mobile are spending a billion dollars a year denying the facts of climate change. This completely dwarfs the research budgets of all climate researchers the world over.

But I guess they have the money to burn.