North Dakota taking steps to use more of its natural gas

North Dakota flares more than 25 percent of the natural gas it extracts from the Bakken oil-shale play. Not only is natural gas cheaper (i.e. not as profitable) than the oil that comes out of the same wells, there’s a lack of pipeline and storage capacity in that region. Texas, by comparison, flares only 1 percent of its natural gas.

But the state is taking steps to build the infrastructure to capture and use more natural gas. As Adam Belz of the Minneapolis Star Tribune notes:

A quiet transformation is underway, however, as the state bids to turn natural gas into a native business and drive down flaring.

A growing network of pipelines and processing plants has made North Dakota a recent target for billions of dollars of investment toward factories that convert natural gas into other products like fertilizer and plastic.