Several oil companies working in western North Dakota were recently recognized for their safety, environmental and community service records by the Three Affiliated Tribes, which make up the Fort Berthold Reservation.
According to the Minot Daily News, the companies included Marathon Oil, Enerplus Resources, WPX Energy, Petro Hunt and QEP Resources. The awards were presented during the MHA (Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara) Nation’s annual Bakken Oil & gas Expo in early May.
Enerplus was presented with the Best Management Practices Award, which recognized the company for its environmental practices such as placing housing on its flare stacks to contain gas contaminates and using hydro mulch rather than hay on the drill sites, according to the Minot newspaper.
Marathon Oil received the Safety Award based on the number of accident-free operations it has conducted since arriving on Fort Berthold in 2008, according to the Daily News.
WPX, Petro Hunt and QEP all received Community Service Awards for their financial contributions to local service clubs and programs.
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Miners lining up for bentonite clay
It’s called “the clay of 1,000 uses” and one of those uses is drilling, which is why activity in the Bakken field of North Dakota is sparking an increased demand for bentonite from the mines of northcentral Wyoming.
According to the Billings (Mont.) Gazette, mining applications to the Bureau of Land Management are pouring in as firms try to meet the demand for the clay, which can swell to 16 times its original size and absorb 10 times its weight in water. Along with its use in the energy and transportation industries, bentonite also is used in cat litter, beauty supplies and as a binding agent for animal feed.
“Bentonite is considered an industrial mineral, and so it goes into a number of different products,” Lyndon Bucher, a permitting and reclamation manager for American Colloid, told the Gazette. “You could say we’re something of a bellwether for the national economy. For the most part, as the economy goes, so goes the bentonite industry.”
According to the Billings newspaper, Wyoming’s annual bentonite production has risen from 1,400 tons in 1927 to more than 4.5 million tons.
The Gazette reported that according to BLM, five companies are engaged in 19 active mining plans across several counties in northcentral Wyoming and across the border in Montana. The different beds of clay contain different qualities suited for a variety of industrial uses, such as drilling mud.
“If it’s oil and gas drilling, we’ll target a specific clay for that,” Bucher told the Gazette. “We have many different customers, and we’ll try to meet the market demand by mining in these different areas and getting the right quality of clay into the plant.”
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Keystone pipeline and gasoline prices
A proposed pipeline to carry Canada’s oil sands crude as well as Bakken-produced oil to the U.S. Gulf Coast has the potential to increase domestic gasoline prices, according to a report from an environmental group opposed to the project, Bloomberg News reported in late May.
The National Resources Defense Council report said TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline would divert crude oil from the U.S. Midwest to Gulf Coast refineries geared to producing diesel fuel for export. In turn, that will decrease the amount of gasoline produced for U.S. consumers and raise production costs, making the fuel more expensive, according to Bloomberg’s story on the report.
“This requires President Obama and his administration and the Congress to take a real look at the impact of tar sands to the environment and not have to worry about the political issue of gas prices,” NRDC attorney and report author Anthony Swift told reporters in a conference call. According to Bloomberg, the NRDC and other environmental groups oppose expansion of Canadian oil sands production — which extracts the heavy oil by surface mining — saying that more greenhouse gases are produced compared to conventional processes for crude.
Obama denied the project in January, saying more environmental study was needed. TransCanada has since split the project and reapplied with a restructured plan to bypass some of the more environmentally sensitive areas.
According to Bloomberg, the NRDC report contradicts the findings of energy industry analyst IHS CERA, which released a report last year saying the pipeline would help lower fuel prices. Bloomberg also quoted TransCanada spokesman Shawn Howard, who said the U.S. imports 8 to 9 million barrels of oil a day.
“To somehow suggest that helping offset current imports from Mexico and Venezuela with this Canadian and American crude is going to drive prices up, because what we’re doing is helping replace some of the current feedstock, doesn’t make sense,” Howard told Bloomberg.
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