Underneath the surface of North Dakota is the Bakken Formation, which is part of the Williston Basin that also lies underneath parts of South Dakota, Montana, southwestern Manitoba and southern Saskatchewan. Last week I was in Bismarck, North Dakota at the 2017 Bakken Conference and Expo . I spoke about my company’s efforts to eliminate natural gas flaring in oil fields and then drove around the state to observe the most recent drilling activity there. The Bakken was known to contain oil for many years, but it just wasn’t economical to produce. Hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling changed that. Up until about 2008, North Dakota hadn’t produced much more than 100,000 barrels per day (BPD). But in 2008 the shale oil boom started to pay dividends. In late 2008, North Dakota’s oil production reached 200,000 BPD and then climbed steadily to a peak of 1.2 million BPD in late […]