Gas flares from Bakken fracking are visible from space

Julia Sklar, reporter

(Image: NASA Earth Observatory image by Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon/VIIRS/Suomi NPP)

This sparkling view of American cities from space reveals a town with a different kind of night-life. One of the bright regions that sits alone in the darkness of the northern plains isn't a bustling city at all - instead, this blaze is a night-time view of fracking in action.

Seen in this photo taken by NASA's Suomi NPP satellite, the glow comes from hundreds of flares from rigs drilled into the Bakken formation of North Dakota. The huge amount of unwanted gas being burned off from the production of shale oil creates a light the size of metropolitan Boston.

Bakken is a 360-million-year-old tectonic plate made primarily of shale rock. Fracking has liberated the oil?that lies within it, propelling North Dakota to the second-largest oil producing state in the US, behind Texas.

Flaring is a way to burn off excess natural gas during oil production, but the process effectively wastes a natural resource while simultaneously emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. As of 2011, more than 35 per cent of North Dakota's natural gas production was burnt off in flares, according to a study done by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The same study reported that in 2009, on average, less than 1 per cent of the total amount of natural gas produced in the US was lost to flaring. By those standards, the Bakken formation in North Dakota sticks out as a staggeringly flaring-heavy drilling site and the island of light in this picture only helps make that case.

Read more about fracking in our?Energy and Fuels topic guide.

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/27fb0188/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Cshortsharpscience0C20A130C0A10Cjulia0Esklar0Ereporter0Bhtml0Dcmpid0FRSS0QNSNS0Q20A120EGLOBAL0Qonline0Enews/story01.htm

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