North Dakota Gas Flares

Courtesy of NASA

This past month, 36% of  gas pulled out of the ground in North Dakota was wasted and went up as smoke.  That is more than one third of all gas pulled out of the ground.

The reason.  Profits.

“So while it’s profitable to capture the gas, it’s more profitable to drill the next oil well,” Logan testified. “So if you’re an oil company with a limited amount of money to spend — as they all are — it’s a somewhat rational short-term choice to say, ‘Well look, if I don’t have to capture that gas, I’d rather spend that money to drill another well.’”

“I’ll tell you why people flare: It’s cheap,” Troy Anderson, lead operator of a North Dakota gas-processing plant owned by Whiting Petroleum told The New York Times. “Pipelines are expensive: You have to maintain them. You need permits to build them. They are a pain.”This is why you need regulation.  The idiocy of throwing away one’s future gold because it gets in the way of you currently getting more gold,  is  easily grasped by those with common sense….

Energy is yesterday’s food.  Whereas during the Depression thousands of pigs were killed and buried in the Midwest to keep the cost high, while the cities were starving, today, it is energy that needs regulated to prevent that from occurring.  While propane was going up in smoke,  both North Dakota and South Dakota were suffering propane shortages due to the excessively cold winter….

If North Dakota simply had a state law that said no flaring, then companies would not flare, and a prescious resource would not be sent up to the stratosphere unused…..

Likewise when ever someone begins complaining about “too much regulation,”  perhaps the first thing we should question, should be his motives?…

The free market has stopped working in ways that benefit America.  As in 1932, we are due for a new reset…  Sooner is better than later.