Bakken oil development requires a lot of use of trucks and railroads. A typical horizontal well in North Dakota requires 1,100 inbound truck trips. Then you gotta move the stuff out. It is possible to build gathering facilities, of course, but trucks remain viable for short hauls. Over longer distances, railroads can be competitive. In short, you can have fast oil development without making much investment in specialized infrastructure.
The above is not true for natural gas. For natural gas, pipelines are the only game in town. You build gathering pipelines and processing plants or you don’t produce. No one will build a gathering infrastructure, of course, until they have some idea of how much gas it will carry.
Tight oil wells in the Bakken also produce associated natural gas. The problem, of course, is that you cannot know how much associated gas will be produced from a group of wells until oil production starts. So you need to start oil production before a gas infrastructure is in place.
Of course, if you have wells producing oil, you still need to do something with the associated gas. You could just vent it, but methane is nasty stuff on both the local and global level. So you set it on fire. That gives you CO2 –fine locally, but bad globally, albeit less bad than just venting methane.
In short, there is a chicken-and-egg problem: in an oil play, you need to waste a lot of natural gas before anyone will build the infrastructure needed to use it. In Texas, there is a lot of new drilling, but it is in places that have been drilled before and where a gas infrastructure exists. Texan oil producers, therefore, flare only 0.5% of their associated gas. (It is, however, getting bad in the Eagle Ford.)
In North Dakota, they flare 32% of the gas. That is why it suddenly looks from space as if a major new megalopolis has sprouted in North Dakota.
How big a problem is this? In economic terms, not that much. Losses from Bakken flaring came to $196 million in 2011, or 1.4% of the value of production.(In Texas the economic losses are even less, although you can also see the flaring in that arc running along the south of Texas below the San Antonio-Austin double plex.)
The CO2 problem is more serious, but as you can see below, the Financial Times estimates that Bakken oil is no worse than oil imported from Saudi Arabia:
In short, the flaring problem looks more dramatic than it is, in both economic and environmental terms. That is not a brief for doing nothing, either by private industry or government regulation ... there is money being left around on the table and this is a source of CO2 that is easy to fix. It is a brief for stating that compared to the Canadian tar sands there is nothing to see here. Well, there is ... but only from space. From Washington, not so much.
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