Montana and fracking

Shale oil and gas drilling is increasing across Montana in the Bakken formation, in Sweet Grass and Park counties, the Heath shale below Garfield, Fergus, Petroleum and Rosebud counties, and under the Blackfeet reservation.

Introduction
Montana has been increasing permits to explore state and private land along the Rocky Mountain Front. Companies are hoping to find that oil in the Bakken shale formation, in North Dakota and eastern Montana, extends westward to the eastern flank of the Rocky Mountains.

In 2010 total natural gas production in the state was 70,175,944 MCF (thousand cubic feet), 10.74 percent less than the previous year, while oil was 25,323,108 barrels. Fracking in Montana is currently taking place in Sweet Grass and Park counties.

Legislative issues and regulations
The Montana Board of Oil and Gas Conservation (MBOGC) adopted new rules governing fracking that became effective on August 26, 2011. Operators of fracking sites must now obtain approval from MBOGC prior to drilling. In addition, natural gas operators must now disclose the composition of the fracking fluids used (if a trade secret exemption is not applicable). The MBOGC also mandates specific construction and testing requirements for wells that will be fracked.

The rules have exemptions on chemical disclosure: Operators must disclose the chemical family, but not the exact chemical name, and well operators can decide whether products or chemicals are proprietary.

Environmental groups have challenged the nondisclosure of fracking fluids as proprietary "trade secrets", which they say has too broad of a definition: “We are not sat­is­fied. We’re def­i­nitely happy that the state is finally get­ting around to doing this, but the cur­rent reg­u­la­tions are fairly defi­cient,” Derf John­son, pro­gram assis­tant at the Mon­tana Envi­ron­men­tal Infor­ma­tion Cen­ter.

In September 2013 it was reported that Montana's Attorney General would join Alabama, Alaska and Oklahoma in protesting Bureau of Land Management plans to regulate hydraulic fracturing on federal land.

Bakken formation
Wells have been drilled along the Bakken formation in Montana, with active wells also in North Dakota. Industry experts say oil appears to extend from the Bakken formation of eastern Montana into Alberta, Canada, and south to the foot of the Rocky Mountains. Hydraulic fracking will likely be used to extract the oil, if found. Land leases for fracking in the region have increased dramatically in recent years.

The first commercial Bakken well at Elm Coulee, located in Richland County, Montana, was completed in 1981 by Coastal Oil and Gas. As of 2007 the total number of horizontal Bakken wells drilled in the Elm Coulee area was more than 500 and included more than 800 lateral drill locations.

Oil production estimates
The largest Bakken oil production comes from Elm Coulee Oil Field, in Richland County, Montana, where extraction began in 2000 and is expected to ultimately total 270 million barrels (43,000,000 m3). In 2007, shale oil from Elm Coulee averaged 53,000 barrels per day (8,400 m3/d) — more than the entire state of Montana a few years earlier.

Interest in North Dakota over Montana developed in 2007 when EOG Resources of Houston, Texas reported that a single well it had drilled into an oil-rich layer of shale below Parshall, North Dakota was anticipated to produce 700,000 barrels (110,000 m3) of oil. This, combined with other factors, including an oil-drilling tax break enacted by the state of North Dakota in 2007, shifted attention in the Bakken from Montana to the North Dakota side. The number of wells drilled in the North Dakota Bakken jumped from 300 in 2006, with oil production in the North Dakota Bakken increasing 229%, from 2.2 million barrels (350,000 m3) in 2006 to 7.4 million barrels (1,180,000 m3) in 2007. to 457 in 2007.

In April 2013 a government study doubled its estimates for the Bakken's recoverable crude supplies. The U.S. Geological Survey estimated 7.4 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil in its study.

Bakken land leases
Small and independent oil companies that made their start developing natural gas resources moved into the Bakken and accumulated acreage before the oil boom in the area. As such, the most sought after lands have already been leased for development. New Entrants into the Bakken must participate in joint ventures or buy out another company. This has not discouraged investment as several billion dollars were exchanged in mergers and acquisitions in the Bakken in the fourth quarter of 2010 alone.

Keystone XL Pipeline
In 2012, TransCanada included an “on-ramp” in its Keystone XL Pipeline proposal that would transport Bakken oil to the Gulf Coast. The oil is currently moved on rail cars, trucks, and smaller pipelines. The move is seen as a way for TransCanada to build up support for the pipeline, which would primarily be used to transport Alberta's tar sands from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Usage
The 2013 Western Organization of Resource Councils report, "Gone for good: Fracking and water loss in the West," found that fracking is using 7 billion gallons of water a year in four western states: Wyoming, Colorado, Montana, and North Dakota.

Contamination
Wastewater from oil drilling was injected into the Fort Peck Indian Reservation near Poplar, Montana, after oil drilling began at the nearby East Poplar oil field in 1952. When oil is produced, brine or produced water rich in salts and toxic metals also comes out of the ground. The oil companies injected the wastes back underground to a depth of between 800 and 1,000 feet, where it was assumed the material would stay put. But when scientists came back to the area and drilled 40 boreholes, they found the water was significantly contaminated. In 2010, they tested three public wells Poplar draws its water from and found that all were contaminated with brine. The pollution was due to a well casing failure of an injection well.

Citizen groups

 * Northern Plains Resource Council

Related SourceWatch articles

 * United States and fracking
 * North Dakota and fracking
 * Montana and coal
 * Bakken formation

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