More than 40 percent of North Dakota’s 1.2 million barrels of daily oil production is at risk from the Bureau of Land Management’s new hydraulic fracturing rule, and the state is poised to sue the federal government to protect that production.
The state’s Department of Mineral Resources Director Lynn Helms brought the new rule before the North Dakota Industrial Commission on March 24, urging Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem, who serves on the commission alongside Agriculture Commissioner Doug Goehring and Gov. Jack Dalrymple, to determine a plan of action to stop the new rules from taking effect.
“They went across the country and they picked the most strict pieces and parts of every state’s rules and then they composed a super strict rule out of the strictest parts,” Helms explained.
The rules would give BLM control over the source of fracturing water, its route and transportation source as well as fracturing flowback water and how it would be transported and disposed, requiring operators to apply for a permit before proceeding with fracturing water processes.
“This is major, major overreach on both ends of the fracturing process by BLM,” Helms said.
A lawsuit has already been filed by the Western Energy Alliance and the Independent Petroleum Association of America against BLM and Interior Secretary Sally Jewell in federal court in the district of Wyoming, seeking to stop the rule from taking effect (see related story on page 1). NDIC voted to have the attorney general’s office evaluate filing a lawsuit.
“A lot of states are going to be dissimilarly situated,” Stenehjem said. “So whether it is something we can all band together or whether our situation is so unique that we need to pursue our own is something we need to determine.”
“If they proceed to settle this lawsuit,” Helms added, “North Dakota needs to be at the table. We can’t have a settlement impact that much of North Dakota without a seat at the table.”
Helms was frustrated that BLM appeared to completely ignore North Dakota’s submitted comments to the fracturing rules. North Dakota submitted comments on three different occasions and despite being the second leading oil producer in the nation and the second state to adopt its own hydraulic fracturing rules, “they didn’t even notice,” Helms said.
“You have to wonder at the quality of the rules if they can’t figure out that North Dakota has hydraulic fracturing rules,” he added.
Impacts to ND
Thirty-two percent of the Bakken/Three Forks spacing units would be impacted by the new federal rules, with the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation taking a substantial hit. But federal mineral ownership is found in small tracts throughout spacing units in North Dakota, and the new rules would make it impossible to drill the unit without federal permits.
“We are 12,000 wells into a 60,000-well program here, so maybe as many as a third of those 40,000 wells are at risk of the BLM denying a hydraulic fracturing permit,” he said. “We’ve got 850 unfracked wells … now the timing of that fracturing isn’t based on oil price or gas capture, it’s based on the whim of the BLM.”
Dalrymple capped off the discussion saying that the federal government’s assertion that it has jurisdiction over source water or wastewater is a “direct contradiction” to his understanding of the jurisdiction of the state water commission and health department.
“We need to develop a plan on how we’re going to proceed,” he said. “We need to take action.”
DMR was granted $1 million in the 2013 Legislature to fund a potential lawsuit over the BLM rules.
