North Dakota and Texas both produce a lot of oil - and they also both burn off a lot of natural gas.
According to a recent report by Earthworks, the flaring off of natural gas in North Dakota's Bakken and Texas' Eagle Ford shale fields is equal to the emissions of 1.5 million cars. Don Morrison is Executive Director of the Dakota Resource Council. He says the emissions are bad for the climate, and for the taxpayer. He says 854 million dollars has been burned as waste in the Bakken since 2010, and with that money solar panels could be installed on almost every house in Fargo. Morrison also says it poses a negative health risk.
"People who live near flares - there's respiratory problems, there's people whose legs are getting numb, they've lived near flares for four or five years now. Sometimes the flare goes out. Anytime you put that much of a substance like that into the air, it just doesn't go away; certainly not at the levels that we're flaring in North Dakota which are instead of 1 percent nationally, North Dakota is flaring anywhere from 28 percent to 30 percent. So this is pretty incredible."
Morrison says a lot of the oil is flared off because it can be, and North Dakota is not required to track how much is flared. He says Governor Dalrymple and his administration are more interested in drilling for oil and keeping the oil industry happy, but that now is the time to make sure loopholes in flaring proposals are closed and that progress is accurately tracked.