For want of pipelines to carry it, much of the natural gas that rises with Bakken oil is burned at the wellhead, and the flares turn the western prairie night into a field of small suns.
Oil rarely comes up alone. Along with the Bakken crude rises a stream of natural gas, and for years the plains lacked the pipelines and plants to capture all of it. The surplus is flared — burned off at the wellhead in a roaring orange plume — and from a distance the western oil patch at night can look like a scattered city that isn't there.
A Resource Going Up in Flame
The flares trouble many. They waste a valuable resource, they send carbon skyward to no purpose, and they light a countryside that was once profoundly dark. Regulators and companies alike have pressed to capture more of the gas, building processing plants and gathering lines to route it to market rather than to the sky.
From the almanac's reckoning:
- Natural gas rises together with Bakken crude oil at the wellhead.
- A shortage of pipelines led to widespread flaring of the surplus gas.
- Processing plants and gathering lines now capture a growing share of the gas.
Progress has been real but incomplete, and on a cold clear night the flares still flicker across the horizon. The almanac marks them as the boom's most visible emblem — the sign of wealth coming up faster than the pipes could carry it away.
Elsewhere in the Almanac
The Roughneck's Trade on the Bakken Rig
On drilling floors across the west, the roughnecks work the pipe in long shifts through heat and cold, in one of the hardest and best-paid trades the plains have to offer.
Carbon Capture Comes to the Lignite Country
Hoping to square coal with a lower-carbon future, engineers on the Missouri Slope are pursuing projects to capture carbon dioxide and lock it deep beneath the plains.
Produced Water: The Oil Patch's Other Flood
For every barrel of Bakken oil comes salty water from deep in the earth, and managing that brine has become one of the oil patch's quietest and costliest challenges.