A new report released today by the national environmental nonprofit Earthworks reveals that North Dakota’s massive surge in fracking wastewater production, also known as “produced water,” has potentially increased North Dakotans exposure to carcinogens, heavy metals, and radioactivity. Earthworks calculates that in… More »
This blog was co-written by Tyler Rivlin and Raphael Breit. On December 22, 2019, James Brugh and his wife Victoria, who was seven months pregnant, received a letter from an Ob-Gyn they had visited in Bismarck, ND. Concerned about Victoria’s… More »
Thousands of people from around the world, including hundreds of indigenous and tribal nations, are currently camping near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota to protest the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). What started as a fight to protect sacred Sioux lands from destruction has become a broader struggle for Native American rights, freshwater conservation, and an end to fossil fuel development and corporate greed. On the frontlines, water protectors are facing increasing violence and police repression, but stand strong in peaceful, nonviolent prayer. This kind of unshakable determination has enabled the movement to effectively halt construction of a major pipeline, and has inspired people from around the world to lend their support.
The chaotic destruction of productive farmland, beautiful badlands and people’s lives in North Dakota to exact oil is unnecessary. The oil could be extracted without destroying the place in the process.
State officials have allowed the oil industry to produce a product before the industry made sure it had transportation, disposal of its radioactive waste, safety, housing, law enforcement and most other infrastructure available. Now, to fix their poor planning, they want you and me to take the risk for their contamination, exploding trains, and other problems.
The impacts of this fast-as-possible oil extraction reaches across North America.
North Dakota’s Bakken oil field is one of the most active fracking sites in the U.S. It's so big, you can see the flares burning from outer space.
Most people will never visit the Bakken. Far removed from major cities, it is difficult to see how it affects all of our lives.
As North Dakota officials try and determine how to regulate and dispose of the Bakken’s radioactive fracking waste, the sea of contamination gets deeper by the day. According to representatives at the North Dakota Dept. of Health, new rules regulating… More »
Media Releases
State oversight allows flaring in North Dakota and Texas to emit greenhouse gases equal to 1.5 million cars
Aug 22 -- Today Earthworks released a new report showing that eliminating natural gas waste in two shale plays would have the same effect as taking 1.5 million cars off the road. The report is accompanied by an interactive map developed by SkyTruth showing flaring activity in the U.S. and around the world based on nightly, infrared satellite data.
The holidays brought disaster to Casselton, North Dakota, in the form of exploding tank cars on the railroad line just outside of town. After striking another train, a BNSF train hauling 104 tank cars filled with Bakken Shale crude oil began to explode
A recent state report showed that oil and natural gas producers in North Dakota were flaring (burning it at the wellhead) 29 percent of the approximately 31 billion cubic feet of natural gas produced in the state in August. That’s about nine billion cubic feet of natural gas that never made it into people’s homes to provide heat or into factories to produce goods. To put this figure in perspective, the nine billion cubic feet of natural gas flared in a single month (more than $30 million at August natural gas prices) is enough to supply residential customers in North Dakota for most of an entire year. The state’s residential customers used 9.7 billion cubic feet of natural gas in 2012 according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Nor will private landowners collect royalties or the state collect production taxes on the flared gas. Nationally, only one percent of natural gas is flared.