RJ Sigmund: Got gas? Bakken oil wells flaring natgas, as seen from space

got gas? oil well flaring as seen from space

below are pictures of the upper Midwest and Texas excerpted from the Earth at Night, which are cloud-free night images created from the Suomi NPP, a new NASA and NOAA satellite…encircled in the top photo is the light given off from flaring oil wells in the Bakken shale formation of N. Dakota and eastern Montana; the lower photo shows Texas at night, with the flaring from the oil fields in the Eagle Ford Shale region of Texas shown between the two red lines, with lights from major cities also marked for contrast...

when the oil shale is fracked, not only oil is liberated from the rock, but also a large amount of trapped natural gas, mostly methane, is released…with the energy value of the oil worth as much as 30 times that of the gas, the exploitation companies want no part of the delay involved in capturing the cheaper gas, and would rather burn it off than build the infrastructure to capture and transport to where it could be used; this gas ‘flaring’ is shown in the video from a well in N Dakota below…

as you can hear, the sound of that flaring is not unlike a jet engine, rattling neighbors, who can neither sleep nor use their yards…in addition to the waste of $110 million worth useful natural gas each year, this flaring is adding more than two million tons of carbon pollution to the atmosphere each year from N Dakota alone, where more than 100 million cubic feet of natural gas is flared this way each day, which is enough to heat half a million homes each day, more than the population of Minneapolis, which you can also see nearby in the top photo above…

http://marketwatch666.blogspot.com/2012/12/got-gas-oil-well-flaring-from-space.html