Al Anderson opened the North Dakota Governor’s Pipeline Summit with praise for the individuals in attendance that represented the state’s midstream oil and gas industry.
“We’ve gathered some of the brightest and the best industry leaders in one location,” the commissioner of N.D.’s Commerce Department said. “They’re going to talk … about their current and potential investments in building the state’s pipeline infrastructure.”
Then Anderson set the tone for Gov. Jack Dalrymple’s message: North Dakotans want as many trucks off their roads and highways as possible; tanker trucks carrying oil being at the top of the list. That’s going to take transmission pipelines, lots of pipelines, and lots of gathering lines.
Plus, North Dakotans want gas flaring to stop, which is wasting a valuable commodity and harming the environment.
That’s going to take lots more processing facilities.
Pipelines are critical
“Build more, do more, gather more. And please do it as soon as you possibly can because there’s no single thing that helps us more with the impacts on our communities,” Dalrymple told the audience, after thanking them for being there and for the investment and jobs they had brought to North Dakota.
“A couple years ago if you told me there would be 107 people interested in signing up for a conference on pipelines I might have questioned your sanity,” he said.
But pipelines, which the governor now considers exciting, “are a critical and very important part of our transportation landscape out here, and considered the safest and most reliable and most cost effective way to transport oil and gas, and in addition … they reduce, significantly, the impacts of oil development to our roadways and to our communities — and that’s where we really become your allies in this,” Dalrymple said.
“As far as we’re concerned in North Dakota, you can’t go too fast in getting the gathering systems built, getting the pipelines hooked together, getting them operational. There is no single thing that I can think of that can do more to reduce the human impacts of rapid oil development than pipelines,” he said.
“Based on production estimates … within the next three to five years, we are on track to have our state’s production actually handled by pipeline,” Dalrymple said.
“Ideally, we would like to see as many feeder lines as possible, connecting our well sites to the transmission pipelines,” he said, naming one example, the “Four Bears pipeline in western North Dakota near Watford City,” which is 77 miles long and when it went into operation eliminated 11 million truck miles annually.
Stop wasting gas
Pipelines, he said, also “play a huge role in the transportation of natural gas. … One of the obvious benefits of gathering systems for natural gas is the reduction in flaring,” the governor said.
“North Dakotans really don’t like flaring. They … are people who come from an agricultural background and they see a flare and they just see nothing but waste. And waste bothers North Dakotans tremendously. It bothers me.”
In the end, the governor believes the interests of the industry and the interests of the citizens of North Dakota are aligned.
“Bring the economic benefits, but get rid of any of the less pleasant side-affects,” he said.
