Day 409: August 22nd, 2020
Day 409: August 22nd, 2020. This is Part II of yesterday's post. You don't necessarily need to have read yesterday's post to understand this one, but I'd recommend it as it provides context.
Yesterday while I was researching light pollution, I came across plenty of statistics and satellite maps showing exactly how much light there is across the globe. They highlighted the major metropolitan areas across the globe, showed how light pollution severely thins as you start to get into the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, but it also showed a curious hotspot in what looked like Montana or North Dakota. I don't know how familiar you are with United States geography, but there are no major metro areas within hundreds of miles of those states. And this dot (depending on the map) rivaled the size of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, an area home to over 3 million residents. So what was it? A secret military-base I had not heard about? A massive cluster of data centers? No, it's the Bakken fields, an oil-rich area that has drove North Dakota to becoming the second-largest oil producing state in the U.S.
All that light comes not only from the lights on the oil rigs, it also comes from something called flaring. Fracking, a technique oil producers use to extract oil from deep within the Earth, also causes natural gas to seep up out of natural gas pockets. But since oil producers aren't in the market for the byproduct, they burn it (or 'flare' it) as it comes up. So yes: when oil producers are fracking to find fuel, they are at the same time burning fuel - and lots of it. In 2013, drillers in North Dakota alone were burning enough gas to heat half a million homes EVERY SINGLE DAY. Natural gas is much harder to capture and transport than oil, but it also brings in a lot less money, meaning it's "not worth it" to oil producers. North Dakota has laws and regulations against that much burning, but officials have been slow to enforce them. There were also a lack of natural gas pipelines in the area, so the governments had to decide if either they would let oil producers burn off the natural gas, instead have the natural gas just leak straight into the atmosphere, or halt fracking altogether, one of the biggest source of jobs the state had to offer.
Since 2013, more infrastructure for capturing natural gas has been put in place, but flaring remains a huge problem, even across the globe. In 2018, 145 billion cubic meters of gas was flared, the same amount that Central and South America use in a year combined. While capturing and using natural gas is not the end goal (natural gas is not green energy, people), it only makes sense to capture the gas as long as fracking is going on. We need to stop fracking, flaring, and using oil altogether, but until we get everyone on the same page, we need to stop senselessly burning fuel in order to get to other fuel.
I read so many different articles on this one, pick any of them and you're guaranteed a good read: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/flaring-or-why-so-much-gas-is-going-up-in-flames/2019/09/10/934b369a-d3f5-11e9-8924-1db7dac797fb_story.html
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-north-dakota-natural-gas-flaring-carbon-emissions-20190527-story.html
...This is the initial article I found on the Bakken fields (from 2013 but gives good background on them): https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/01/16/169511949/a-mysterious-patch-of-light-shows-up-in-the-north-dakota-dark
