Conservative Principles in North Dakota are Real

August 7, 2021 10:08 PM

How to choose between Property Rights and Big Business? Western North Dakota is currently going through an Industrial Revolution thanks to the oil and gas industry. But the rights of property holders might be getting in the way of extractive business. Between the seeming inability to safely deal with the saltwater byproducts of fracking and because of an interesting little quirk of mineral rights law there is a division growing in the conservative political minds of North Dakota. Get some popcorn because the show is going to be real interesting and divorced from much of what the blue might think of as reality.
posted by Ignorantsavage (25 comments total)

From "The Beverly Hillbillies" sitcom setup to "Some landowners have made millions of dollars from selling the rights to oil beneath their land to major corporations."

-- the foundational rules of our economics is fundamentally broken with this failure to implement simple severance taxes correctly.

'course, tilting the playfield towards them has been the GOP's entire game the whole time
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 10:36 PM on August 7, 2021 [3 favorites]

divorced from much of what the blue might think of as reality

Meh, they can keep their Trump mugs. Today's conservative may just a liberal who has been mugged. Tomorrow's environmental activist may be a conservative who got poisoned by their cult leader. If they survive long enough.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:02 PM on August 7, 2021 [5 favorites]

On the subject of severance taxes -- oil produced from North Dakota's Bakken formation is taxed at only 5%.

In Norway, for comparison's sake, the extraction tax is about 51%.
posted by theory at 11:18 PM on August 7, 2021 [15 favorites]

First of all, the picture of the man mowing in open toe flip flops is giving me nightmares.

Second, the pore space stuff is rather settled. If you sell off the mineral rights you're doing just that. Once the mineral is depleted it reverts back to the surface owner... Ellis v. Arkansas Louisiana Gas Company is often cited as a good example when the o&g company used a reservoir they had mineral rights on to sequester natural gas. But you can't do that, it is just for the extraction.

I'm sure big oil had some really great lawyers on this but you're overturning a lot of settled case law. It is enshrined in law in other oil rich states like Oklahoma, North Dakota would be on their own on this one.

Edit: The political angle on this as being another conservative divide is interesting and all, but I found the legal implications much more interesting.
posted by geoff. at 11:21 PM on August 7, 2021 [7 favorites]

Pretending that an individual can negotiate fairly with a company is a) a sign of massive dishonesty or b) a sign of staggering ignorance. This is one of the things governments are for.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:34 AM on August 8, 2021 [35 favorites]

Interesting, sad read. This stuck out at me:

“I believe we can co-exist with agriculture and industry throughout the productive life of the Bakken,” Brown told me. (my bold)

Because it made it 100% clear that this is about exploiting the land until it is wasted, and then moving on. The American Way. And it is doubly tragic because in a generation or too, if we survive, fossil fuels will be more or less redundant, only used for some products that can't be made without (and for instance, compostable plastic has come a long way in the last decade). But the land will be wasted for many more generations.
posted by mumimor at 4:09 AM on August 8, 2021 [14 favorites]

They represent for their sponsors, and as long as the voters are content being agitated with memes and fear and bathrooms and baby Jesus none of that will change.
posted by lon_star at 4:35 AM on August 8, 2021 [2 favorites]

No popcorn please. This is not a comedy or a morality play, it's the most rapid mass extinction since an asteroid ended the non-avian dinosaurs. I don't care if it looks like a bunch of rubes are getting some kind of comeuppance... nearly every ecosystem on the planet is being smashed into bits.
posted by cubeb at 5:54 AM on August 8, 2021 [28 favorites]

In Australia Fracking represents the moment that all* the farmers noticed that the National Party, that traditional institution that backed them all the way to Canberra, was actually really the party of the owners of potentially-stranded fossil-fuel companies. Slightly different lens, but only slightly.

* Yeah, ok, some. Miserably few...
posted by pompomtom at 7:01 AM on August 8, 2021 [5 favorites]

Here is the published paper that came out of the 2016 Duke report about the pollution at Bear Den Bay. The Politico article keeps referring to the fracking wastewater as "salt water". It is much worse than that.

In addition to elevated concentrations of dissolved salts (Na, Cl, Br), spill waters also consisted of elevated concentrations of other contaminants (Se, V, Pb, NH4) compared to background waters, and soil and sediment in spill sites had elevated total radium activities (228Ra + 226Ra) relative to background, indicating accumulation of Ra in impacted soil and sediment.

Exposure to high levels of selenium causes cancer and a host of other human health problems. Same with radium. Vanadium interferes with a bunch of organ functions. Lead of course causes brain damage. The biggest risk of ammonium is algal blooms, which would just be one more impact on the local aquatic ecosystems.
posted by hydropsyche at 8:00 AM on August 8, 2021 [12 favorites]

Calling the waste product "saltwater" is such a euphemism, for sure the oil and gas lobbyists had a hand in that. Even calling it "brine" doesn't capture how many chemicals are in the mix (one part of this article talks about a spill that resulted in 600x the recommended levels of chloride) or that even so-called naturally-occurring radioadation from deep underground can be at levels that are not safe for surface water. And this article mentions that in a county that produces 40% of the oil in North Dakota, there are no full-time testers????
posted by subdee at 8:02 AM on August 8, 2021 [9 favorites]

You and me are on the same page, hydropsyche!
posted by subdee at 8:03 AM on August 8, 2021 [1 favorite]

The framing on this OP does show up with that one official who says it's on the residents to negotiate good deals with the oil companies, and also on them if they negotiate bad deals. But in general I think environmental preservation and land conservation should not be a partisan issue.
posted by subdee at 8:06 AM on August 8, 2021

The facts laid out in this article made steam come out of my ears. They're Exhibit A for why you don't allow an industry to oversee and regulate itself. Why? Because 99.9999999 percent of the time, this means that no oversight and regulation happens at all.

From the article (emphasis added):

... As coordinator of local response efforts, many of which come from volunteer fire companies, (McKenzie County Emergency Manager Karoline) Jappe is often on scene after a tanker truck crashes and dumps wastewater, or a saltwater disposal site gets hit by lightning (which can happen several times a year), or a saltwater pipeline bursts a leak. The walls of Jappe’s office are covered with diagrams of well pads and county road maps. Next to her desk, she keeps stocks of extra-large sanitary wipes and emergency spill kits. ...

Oil operations, from well-drilling to production and transportation, are overseen by state agencies, including the powerful North Dakota Industrial Commission. Its board includes three elected officials, all Republicans: Gov. Doug Burgum, Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem and Agriculture Commissioner Doug Goehring. NDIC and other state officials say they have provisions in place to ensure that things are done right the first time or are quickly corrected when not. Yet saltwater spills occur so regularly that local officials and many landowners impacted by the spills are sounding the alarm and, in a rare move, have begun asking for more regulation of the industry.

Jappe is frustrated that state officials aren’t a bigger ally in that battle — or even in helping her do her job. She has tried without success to get a map showing all saltwater pipelines that the industrial commission has authorized in the county.

“I can’t even get a list of them,” Jappe said. “The NDIC won’t give it to me.”

A spokesperson for the NDIC’s Department of Mineral Resources said the North Dakota Century Code requires that all geographic details of oil field pipelines be kept confidential by the NDIC, except by request of an individual property owner or the state tax commissioner.

Landowners, Jappe said, are therefore too reliant on the companies themselves to clean up any accidents.

A cascade of companies, from global titans such as Exxon, Hess and ConocoPhillips, to dozens of smaller operators, play various roles in the industry here, whether drilling or producing oil, servicing wells, burying pipeline or hauling wastewater.

“Sometimes you have a really good company that will clean it up. Sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you don’t ever find out about it,” Jappe said. “I wish saltwater had a little bit more regulation. There just needs to be more accountability.”

posted by virago at 8:34 AM on August 8, 2021 [9 favorites]

Description in the FPP should be "western North Dakota" I think.
posted by escabeche at 9:04 AM on August 8, 2021 [2 favorites]

Also not mentioned in this article, there have been problems with treating the composition of the initial hydrofracking fluid (water + sand + acid + benzene and other solvents) as a proprietary secret, endangering the lives of people exposed to the fluids in their drinking water and of first responders responding to spills. This secret status was endorsed by the US Congress in a 2005 amendment to the Safe Drinking Water Act and undoubtedly has helped fuel the rise of fracking in the US.
posted by hydropsyche at 10:12 AM on August 8, 2021 [4 favorites]

Sounds like Alberta all over again, where the system is designed such that the small well owning companies go bankrupt just as production's falling off. The province is on the hook for cleanup by design — but their fund is billions undersubscribed, and no-one's cleaning up.
posted by scruss at 10:17 AM on August 8, 2021 [5 favorites]

Sounds like North Dakota has a fund to save tax money from the extraction for future use and there's like 9 billion in there, but yeah maybe ALL of that will go toward cleanup.
posted by subdee at 10:23 AM on August 8, 2021 [1 favorite]

North Dakota is hilarious because it’s portrayed as a bastion of conservative values yet it is one of the most socialist of states. It even has a the countries only state-owned bank (BND). A friend of mine recently lost their family farm (one of the oldest in the state) to eminent domain to a flood mitigation project.

To summarize, North Dakota is a land of contrasts.
posted by misterpatrick at 12:27 PM on August 8, 2021 [6 favorites]

If one of the Moderators would please be kind enough to fix my error and change, 'Eastern,' to, 'Western,' in the FPP.
posted by Ignorantsavage at 1:42 PM on August 8, 2021

Mod note: Changed!
posted by Eyebrows McGee (staff) at 6:42 PM on August 8, 2021 [1 favorite]

As far as the call for popcorn goes, that was primarily for reading the article. However there is very little for anyone to do at this point other than watch. If you live and vote in North Dakota, especially McKenzie Co. then you might be able to do something. But short of drastic changes to the USA's system of governance or a vast environmentalist awakening among the conservative and moderate voters we are very much stuck watching these dramas play out with the backdrop of accelerating climatic disaster framing the whole stupid thing.

It does help that this clip [SLYT] is a sad summation of much of my attitude. At this point all we can seek to do is moderate the coming disaster. Anything short of concerted global action is just putting a piece of masking tape on a bullet wound. All carbon extraction industry needs to be stopped across the planet. It needs to happen now so that we have a chance of maintaining some kind of useful agricultural cycle. It is not likely to happen. Short of a miracle technology we are looking at a very rough road for future generations.

I do what I can while still having to function in a culture that has put plastics in near everything. I use public transit, a bicycle, and walk for my travel. I recycle, for what it is worth. I vote for the most pro-save the environment candidates that I can while still being tactical with my vote. Short of a global revolution with a unified environmental agenda I accept that figuring out how to adapt to world that looks more like the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum is going to be our greatest struggle as a species and if we continue using stored hydrocarbons that it may wipe us out.

I am not one who finds much use in hope. Hope is what you turn to when you no longer have agency. But I can find the absurd humor in North Dakota's juju-flop of a situation. That there may be a use for the pores in some form of carbon storage, which might result in greater methane releases as that carbon is processed by the bacteria that created the oil and gas that was initially extracted is just a joke. That conservative property rights activist are creating friction for conservative pro-business oil company puppets which is the only thing that might slow down the damage being done is also a joke. Serious jokes of a dark humor I grant you and maybe not to everyone's pleasure but I will take it where I can.
posted by Ignorantsavage at 6:45 PM on August 8, 2021 [5 favorites]

Calling fracking fluid brine or "salt water" is indeed quite misleading. The production companies were able to slip that one in because I'm traditional drilling that's essentially what it is. The level of contamination from the drilling mud is comparatively tiny, so it isn't a huge issue. The m greater volume of water required to do hydrofracking means less dilution, plus there's more shit in the fracking fluid to begin with.
posted by wierdo at 6:48 PM on August 8, 2021 [1 favorite]

→ Sounds like North Dakota has a fund to save tax money from the extraction for future use and there's like 9 billion in there, but yeah maybe ALL of that will go toward cleanup.

Eh, good luck with that. As of January 2020, Alberta held just C$227 M against an estimated liability of C$30 B. The Canadian Federal government just gave C$1 B to Alberta for oil well cleanup, but all that achieved was that the profitable recipients stopped all their closure work.

Alberta and ND have more than their share of sour wells, so the emissions from that can kill.
posted by scruss at 8:20 AM on August 9, 2021 [1 favorite]

When you tell them this is what they wanted, I'm sure all you'll get is blank stares. Enjoy the dystopia for which you vote time and time again.
posted by AJScease at 4:51 PM on August 9, 2021