That’s low pressure sodium vapor lights, not natural gas flares. It really didn’t get to be orange like that until sometime in the 1990s, from what I remember.
The only flares you’re likely to see around Houston are when the refineries near Pasadena, Deer Park and Texas City have some sort of process problem, and they flare the output while fixing it.
Those can be BRIGHT! My grandparents lived a few miles from the Union Carbide (now Dow Chemical) polyethylene plant in Texas City, and I can remember playing catch after dark with my grandfather by the light of the flares. Kind of surreal in hindsight, but as a kid, I thought it was extra cool that we could play catch longer.
Well, we need it right now. Oil is pretty damned expensive and it will get more expensive the more we restrict drilling.
If the oil companies were sitting on this oil for another decade or two until they could use the gas, CT’ers would say, “The oil companies could lower the price of oil tomorrow, but they’re sitting on huge reserves that they won’t touch until they can extract even more profit out of the gas! The bastards!”
While I agree that we perhaps ‘should have thought of this in the first place’, no one did. Now we see this huge waste and want a solution, but we still need the oil right now - we are a world run on oil, oil, oil, baby. The best option, at this time, for dealing with the associated gas is to flare it (rather then venting).
One minor but perhaps somewhat relevant observation. You’re probably going to see a lot less flaring in the Bakken in the future simply because the mad initial phase of the boom is over.
Wells that are flaring gas usually aren’t connected to oil pipelines either and thus have to be serviced by trucks, which is expensive. From what I understand the issue was that drilling leases usually last 5 years, during which the company either has to drill a well or renegotiate. In around 2006-2008 as it started to become clear how productive the new horizontal drilling techniques were in the Bakken, the prices of those leases skyrocketed. Until about a year ago, oil companies were rushing to just get wells drilled on those older cheap leases as quickly as possible, even if the infrastructure wasn’t really there.
Now that most of those cheaper leases are gone, there’s still tons of drilling activity but they’re a lot more cost-conscious now. That means a lot more it is centered around drilling extra wells on existing well pads that are usually connected to pipelines. Even with completely new well pads, because there’s no longer as much of a rush it’s more likely to be drilling following the pipelines instead of the other other way around.
Really? We need this oil right now? And do we need this oil because oil is the only suitable material, or do we need it in the sense that it’s the cheapest material available, leading into the rather circular argument of it needs to be cheap because we need to use cheap stuff?
We need more jobs, we have factories that closed because environmental regulations, labor laws, and the like made it too expensive to operate here–so should we get rid of all of that, too?
Exactly how and why would North Dakota develop facilities to do something with natural gas when we toss environmental and long-term resource preservation out the window in the name of keeping oil cheap?
I agree flaring is undesirable, but you’re conflating two separate ideas.
You’re conflating legal and ethical/moral justifications. While it may be environmentally detrimental, it’s not illegal to flare.
And legality is the only thing we have to go on. It’s not reasonable to expect everybody to share the same moral values.
I’d be on board with making flaring illegal. But until it is illegal, you’re asking people to make moral judgments based on your values rather than theirs.
I don’t claim any expertise in the gas industry, but I have worked on gas pipelines and a gas compression plant in the UK. Due to the nature of the industry you have to go through a detailed ‘induction’ where a lot of the industry is explained.
Most of the gas in the UK is stored in underground pipes at a pressure of about 90 bar ( A figure which I found quite astonishing).
The steel pipes are a metre in diameter and (from memory) about 3/4 of an inch in thickness.
They come in prefabricated sections about twenty metres long. There’s six or seven welds at each joint (i.e. Weld, grind off the slag, weld again). The sections come pre-coated with an epoxy resin to avoid exposure of the steel to groundwater. Before burial, the joints are also coated and the pipes are checked over with a device that looks rather like a squeegee that you would clean your cars windscreen with but gives off about 7,000 volts (at an extremely low ampage) to find any places where the epoxy has been damaged. They don’t tend to leak…
(Again from memory) When things are in full swing, you’re looking at 3-3.5 miles per week laying a pipeline. Obviously, geographical factors come into play, but I’d think that would be a reasonable ballpark figure.
Obviously, this is in the UK, so the distances are going to be far shorter and also we have an established National Grid for gas supplies. I’ve no idea about US gas distribution so I can’t really comment.
I think Grumman’s point may have some merit. I would imagine that electricity would be far cheaper to transport than gas.
We don’t have a national grid, most U.S. households don’t have access to gas pipes and electrical is probably preferred for safety reasons, and even if we did and they were, it wouldn’t reach into rural areas of North Dakota.
Whether you’re laying pipe or wire there’s not much of a difference: it’s a fairly significant short-term expense that is usually expected to be repaid over time. But here they wouldn’t be doing so, because it’s not intended to last that long.
If you wanted to buy it, getting some kind of short-term barrel storage would be best. That does create the possibility of leakage, however, and requires a lot of transport.
Both fair points. As I said, I don’t know anything about the American gas industry, I was just providing “Notes From A Small Country”, where gas is widely used. I do understand that the distances involved are far greater than over here which would have a significant effect on the profitability of any operation.
How much oil and gas are they looking at in North Dakota?
Well again, we are talking about $110 million worth of gas per day, at last year’s deflated prices. That is over $40 billion worth of gas wasted, per year. Building some storage in advance, even at great expense, is the only rational way to go. So what if it sits around for 2 years before it can be used? This country has a massive petroleum reserve and nobody cries about that. We’re talking about $100+ billion worth of gas wasted every 2.5 years or less. The proposed gas pipeline from Alaska was supposed to cost~$30 billion. It is just stupid, not to mention foreseeable and preventable, to waste a resource on this scale.
Building gas storage is basically impossible - too much space required. The vast majority of natural gas storage occurs in naturally occurring formations, such as salt domes.
ND flared 50,000 million cubic feet in 2011 (eia doesn’t have 2012 numbers posted yet, and it’s the most accurate source).
That’s equal to about 50,000,000 mmbtus. The price of natural gas has been around 3 to 4 dollars per mmbtu at the Henry Hub for the last year.
That means the value of the natural gas flares in ND for 2011 was about 150 to 20 million. Certainly not nothing, but for folks talking about building a power plant to burn it, the cost of a combined cycle facility is around half of a billion dollars - not counting the cost of building the transmission or gas transport infrastucture.
A CC facility typically has an average heat rate of 7 mmbtus / mwhr. At 600 MWs, a CC running at 85% capacity factor would consume about 31,000,000 mmbtus - that’s less than the flaring amount.
And in the mean time, most of the country is over-built in terms of generation capacity because if the lower than expected load growth over the last 5 years - so the energy would just be replacing energy already being produced, at best at an average of about $5/mwhr - making the incremental value of the energy less than 25 million.
What I’m saying is that the cost of the energy would only be about $5/mwhr less than the current cost, making the value of the energy equal to the delta between current and future costs multiplied by the volume, with the volume equal to the capacity of the plant times the capacity factor times 8760 hours per year.
This is how the energy value of a plant is typically analyzed, with all future years’ energy savings brought back to a present value at a discount rate equal to the company’s cost of financing and comparing that value to the cost of building the plant.
At a 12% discount rate, 25 million a year for 30 years would onl be worth about 200 million dollars - well short of the cost of the plant. Now, obviously there is a capacity value on that gen in addiition ot the energy - but there wouldn’t be nearly enough to justify the build on pure economics.
eta: this is how a regulated utility would analyze - a merchant plant would compare the cost of energy to future market prices of power - in this instance, you wouldn’t see much of a difference, with the exception that a merchant plant typically has a higher discount rate than a regulated utility.
No one’s really 100% sure, but it appears to be between 15-20 billion recoverable barrels of oil under the Bakken shale (which also covers parts of Saskatchewan and Montana). It wouldn’t be too surprising if it was more. It’s also way up from the 3-4 billion barrel estimate you get without fracking or horizontal drilling.
And there’s also a jaw-dropping amount of gas available there, too.
Infrastructure to more efficiently extract and transport all the oil/gas will eventually get built. It’s just going to take a while. As mentioned multiple times in this thread, utilizing the gas for electricity directly is still a billion dollar proposition and takes years.
Hmmm… this quote from the Christian Science Monitor made it sound like it was a lot more than that:
$110 million a day vs. per year is a big difference. $1 per cf isn’t correct. Still, it is a big waste. These guys don’t have any problem with hauling thousands of truckloads of water out to the middle of nowhere, so why not take the extra trouble for millions worth of gas?
Still changes the story though. Thanks for the links.
As many have already said, this is a general oil field problem, not just North Dakota’s… South Texas’ Eagle Ford Shale oil boom area (south of San Antonio) looks just like North Dakota at night as well.
It’s basic economics, and you really don’t seem to understand that.
Without the water, their wells don’t work, so no money made.
Extracting, storing, and transporting the millions worth of gas right now is not possible. The infrastructure is not there. Developing sufficient infrastructure would cost literally hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. It will eventually be done, but it literally costs them money to do it right this very instant.
And because it’s uneconomic to recover the gas, the workable solutions involve legislation rather than asking why they ‘waste’ the gas. It’s a waste from an environmental perspective, but for the companies operating, it’s a ‘waste’ of company resources to extract them unless there’s a good reason (like jail time or massive fines) to do otherwise.
I’ve got a friend who has been working in/on an LNG plant in North Africa for the last 8 years. It’s still not open. From start to finish, it will be well over 12 years before it’s operational. And that’s with less stringent environmental regulations than the US.