Posted on 08/25/2014 3:41:20 PM PDT by Lorianne
From his driveway, Tom Wheeler's view of North Dakota's sprawling grasslands seems endless. Fields of soy, wheat and canola stretch to the horizon in all directions. But as drillers flock to the state to cash in on North Dakota's booming shale play, that horizon has become increasingly marked by natural gas flares.
Flaring is the burning of natural gas that can't be processed or sold.
All those flares, meanwhile, are adding up. They burn so brightly that NASA astronauts have taken pictures of their glow from space.
For some landowners like Wheeler, it's not the noise or light pollution that gets to them. It's the region's wasted natural resource.
In Ray, Hess has a gas compression station bordering Wheeler's property. Natural gas is pumped from several surrounding oil wells, before being transported to a larger processing facility in Tioga. A four-burner flare sounds like a jet engine, and the 20-foot flame, sitting atop the 30-foot torch, can be seen for miles.
"It's not just a waste to the landowner or the tax collector, it's a waste of the land's natural product," Wheeler said. "When I was growing up, we were taught not to waste anything."
Every day, drillers in the Bakken burn off about 350 million cubic feet of natural gas. That comes to more than $100 million worth of gas burned off each month—a figure that makes the state's mineral rights holders' unhappy. There are at least 12 class-action law suits filed against the drillers by mineral rights holders seeking lost revenue.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnbc.com ...
Buffet has tank car and railroad interests. I think he does care!
Having railroad interests means that Buffet has interest in natural gas as a potential future fuel. But he has no interest in transporting it -- tank car shipment of natural gas via rail simply isn't economically feasible.
It would require insulated and reinforced tank cars to contain LNG or CNG -- expensive to build, heavy and expensive to transport. Plus, it magnifies the liability of violent explosion.
Some compressed gasses are shipped by rail, but that is usually in the form of car load lots of cylinders.
By poison, I presume you mean oil wells and gas flares. Maybe you should look at the benefits of this. Black equals green: In New Mexico it provides 31% of the tax revenue for the entire state. My local small community is number 3 in the state in the amount of tax revenue just behind Santa Fe and with ABQ #1. Unemployment is between 2 and 3% and the median income exceeds $60,000. If this green is poison, I'll take it.
Who get their money from the Saudis.
No that is not what was refered to as poison, the poison refered to is GMO wheat, GMO soy beans, and canola.
My bad -- Sorry.
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