We Did Start the Fire—Is Gas Flaring in the Bakken Set to Cool?
From the start of the Bakken oil production boom four years ago, a substantial portion of the associated natural gas produced has been flared, mostly due to a lack of gas gathering and processing infrastructure. Widespread flaring continues as the energy industry struggles to keep pace with the Bakken’s explosive growth. Finally, though, a confluence of events—new gas gathering and processing capacity coming online, new rules on flaring, and the emergence of new technologies for capturing and using stranded gas--suggests flaring activity may decline significantly over the next few years. In this new blog series, we examine what the energy industry, the government and entrepreneurs have been doing to help solve one of the shale era’s most persistent and high-profile problems.
