The Weather.com forecast for the Bad Lands on Monday showed a couple of days of mostly sunny skies with possible showers, so we loaded up the tent, sleeping bags, mattresses, food and hiking boots and headed west. We settled in about supper time on a Little Missouri River gravel bar a mile or so from the Elkhorn Ranch site, on some Forest Service land near the ranch owned by a friend of ours.
Tuesday was a grand hiking day. Mid-afternoon found us at the Elkhorn Ranch site, and as we walked down the mowed trail, we heard, behind us, a steady cadence: thump . . . thump . . . thump . . . thump . . . We paused to listen, and then Lillian said “It’s that oil well, up on the ridge.”
There are, in fact, three oil pumpers about a mile and a half, maybe two miles, from the Elkhorn site, high on a ridge overlooking the Buckhorn ranch, just upriver from the Elkhorn. You can see one of them from the ranch site (oil companies love busting the skyline instead of tucking their well pumpers down in a draw where you can’t see—or hear—them).
And what had happened as we hiked was that the wind was behind us, blowing maybe 15 or 20 miles per hour (a gentle zephyr by North Dakota standards), and carrying the sound of that well over that distance. Once we realized what it was, of course, it sounded even louder. THUMP . . . THUMP . . . THUMP . . . THUMP . . . THUMP.
Now this was not one of those old 20th century one-lung pumps you could hear for miles and miles. No, this was a modern, 21st century, state-of-the-art pump, and we could hear it – and see it – distinctly, from almost two miles away.
That’s what’s so troubling about Rick Berg’s statements that he thinks we should allow horizontal drilling under Theodore Roosevelt National Park. I don’t want to see or hear any more oil development from Buck Hill or the Oxbow Overlook. I don’t think most North Dakotans, or most Americans, for that matter, do either.
But mostly there are two things about Rick Berg, and this whole issue he brought up a week or so ago, that really trouble me. The first is that I’m not sure Rick really knows much about western North Dakota. The second is he is running for an office that could affect policy about how we deal with western North Dakota, and if he should win, he could prove to be a big embarrassment to us as a state.
Let’s deal with these one at a time. We have oil under most of western North Dakota. Probably 15 million acres of land in western North Dakota have some oil under them. The Bakken alone, currently our most productive field, is under, from what I can tell, at least 3 million acres of North Dakota, probably more. The federal government owns more than a million acres in the western North Dakota. New wells are being drilled as fast as we can get drilling rigs to North Dakota. As I stated in an earlier column, Theodore Roosevelt National Park is just 70,000 acres out of the 15 million acres with oil under them. The National Park is less than one tenth of one per cent of the land in North Dakota with oil under it. It is less than 4 per cent of the land owned by the federal government with oil under it. So why in the world would we even be talking about drilling there? When we’ve drilled every other federal acre, the other 96 per cent, perhaps, 20, 40 or 100 years from now, we can discuss it. Maybe.
The second point is that people with screwed up priorities who get elected to office can do real damage, and so we need to try to be a little careful about who we elect. Case in point:
In its final days, the Bush administration issued new management plans for the spectacular red rocks area of southern Utah, and announced they would begin leasing on the fringes of places like Arches National Monument for drilling for oil and natural gas. Sure enough, in December 2008, the Bureau of Land Management went ahead and held a lease sale for mineral acres just outside a number of national parks and proposed wilderness areas in Utah. Just days after the sale, wilderness organizations filed a lawsuit, and in January a judge granted a temporary restraining order against the BLM, halting the issuance of the leases. In early February, just two weeks after President Obama took office, his new Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, ordered the BLM (often called the Bureau of Leasing and Mining by people like us) to cancel the sales. Secretary Salazar explained that his actions were necessary because “[i]n its last weeks in office, the Bush Administration rushed ahead to sell oil and gas leases at the doorstep of some of our nation’s most treasured landscapes in Utah.” Thank you, Secretary Salazar, for proving, once again, that elections have consequences.
Now, back to matters at hand. Rick Berg screwed up. No question about that. Desperation often flows through political candidates, and they say dumb things. For Berg, this one was a doozy. But it says something about how he thinks, and how he might act as a Congressman. He’s desperate as a candidate right now to throw out big ideas. He’s also smart enough to try to back off, as he did in a Grand Forks Herald submission this week: “I would consider national park resources only if there was a way to do so without entering the park, by using technology such as horizontal drilling to go under the park from well outside the park boundaries, and then only if it would in no way affect the park or view shed.”
But the thing is, Rick, there are some things you can’t control. The government doesn’t drill for oil. Private companies do. All the government does is lease the land and the minerals to the oil companies. There’s no way to know, when the leases are issued, where the oil company will put the well and the tanks, which way the sound will drift, where the road will go for the service vehicles, how far the smell of the natural gas will drift, how bright the flare will be, and a whole bunch of other things that could affect the quality of the park experience. How far can that horizontal pipe go? A mile? Two miles? How far is far enough? There’s just a lot you don’t know about the oil industry, and about western North Dakota, Rick. We can forgive your Red River Valley naivete about this part of your state. Except that you could be the Congressman for the whole state. You need to do your homework.
One thing is pretty sure. This dumb idea is going nowhere fast. There’s no need to panic. A friend of mine has already said this is the time she will lay down in front of a drilling rig. I hope that won’t be necessary. Another friend said recently, as we were canoeing through the Bad Lands, and rounded a bend in the Little Missouri River to encounter an oil well almost on the river bank, “If there was a God, He would have put the oil under Iowa.” Well, I’m not so sure. We DO kind of like the taxes the state is collecting. But Richland, Cass, Traill, Grand Forks and Pembina Counties might have been a nice place for it.
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