If you have enough money and a decent credit score, there appears to be almost limitless ways that you can become a millionaire in North Dakota. Their oil boom is so big and so sudden that they don’t have enough of anything. In the midst of the mortgage crisis and financial meltdown, housing prices near the oil fields have doubled. They can’t find housing for all their workers. They can’t find workers for all their jobs. They need more rail lines. They desperately need new natural gas pipelines. They need new schools and oodles of new teachers and daycare providers. They need hotel rooms. They need roads that can handle all the heavy equipment and plenty of road maintenance crews. They need environmental inspectors and clean-up crews. They need more police officers. And all these new workers need services and diversions.
If you could afford to build a decent trailer park, you could retire. There are so many opportunities to start businesses or make investments there that it’s hard to know where to start.
And, yet, it’s a giant environmental disaster.
There aren’t enough pipelines or gas gathering stations to capture the natural gas that is found along with the oil. So oil companies in North Dakota are simply burning — flaring — the natural gas. Decades ago, that was common, but today in the United States it’s virtually unheard of. Nationwide, the amount of natural gas being flared is well under 1 percent. But North Dakota is flaring 34 percent of its gas.
Ross says it’s hard to build plants to separate natural gas from its liquid components as fast as new wells are going in. Moreover, gas separation plants and gathering systems are expensive. A small plant next to Whiting’s office in Belfield cost the company $200 million. Whiting beats the North Dakota average, but it is still flaring about 20 percent of its gas.
On July 3, the World Bank issued a report on gas flaring that called North Dakota the world’s worst offender. It is responsible for a more than tripling of U.S. gas flaring. If North Dakota were a country, it would rank fifth in the world in gas flaring, behind Russia, Nigeria, Iran and Iraq. The greenhouse gas emissions from North Dakota’s flares are equivalent to those produced by 2.5 million cars.
The gas flares can be seen almost everywhere, most easily in the evening. Drive the gentle curves of scenic Highway 1804, named for the year Lewis and Clark traveled through the area’s buttes and camped along Antelope Creek, and one can see dozens of gas flares, some of them 25 feet high, lighting up the valley like industrial campfires.
So, there are moral scruples involved, assuming you have any of those. But, on the other hand, there are many opportunities to make money off mitigating the disaster or, at least, cleaning some of it up. It’s a Black Gold Rush.
