From the inbox:
Every day across the western half of North Dakota 100 million cubic feet of natural gas is deliberately burned by oil companies rushing to extract oil from the Bakken shale field and take advantage of the high price of crude. The gas bubbles up alongside the oil, and with less economic incentive to capture it, the drillers treat the gas as waste and simply burn it.
Here is the caption on slide 3 of 5:
At a well site near Stanley, N.D., a flare burned in the distance as a trucker loaded his rig with crude from the well. Drilling leases are typically short, and building the infrastructure to handle the gas for sale would substantially raise costs, so drillers have found it to be more profitable to just grab the oil and burn the gas.
Here is a link to the slideshow.
Here is a quote and picture from the longer article:
Every day, more than 100 million cubic feet of natural gas is flared this way — enough energy to heat half a million homes for a day.
The flared gas also spews at least two million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year, as much as 384,000 cars or a medium-size coal-fired power plant would emit, alarming some environmentalists.
