The Bills Are Coming Due in the American Petrostate of North Dakota

Some folks got rich quick in the fracking boom, but now they're concerned about the damage to their land and their water.

By Charles P. Pierce

Aug 9, 2021


KEN CEDENOGETTY IMAGES

There are times when it is Tiger Beat On The Potomac, and there are times when it’s just Politico. Most often, the latter incidents occur in Politico Magazine, which has been a strong product ever since its launch, its early call on DeSantis v. COVID notwithstanding. One of these occasions can be found in Tom Haines’s lucid examination of how North Dakota is handling the inevitable—and highly predictable—consequences of having declared itself a petrostate a few years back. Both Dakotas pretty much gave themselves over to the extraction industry over the last couple of decades. It was there that fracking got to be the hot new thing. Now, the bills are coming due, and crows doth sit upon the drilling rigs.

Fracking has also accelerated life on the surface. Some landowners have made millions of dollars from selling the rights to oil beneath their land to major corporations. And struggling agricultural crossroads, including Watford City, the county seat 20 miles southeast of Novak’s farm, have found new life as boomtowns. During the past decade, a new high school and hospital, and housing developments sprawling from Main Street into the prairie, have arisen to serve the more than 10,000 people who have come from afar to work in the McKenzie County oil field.

But installing an industry atop an agricultural zone has brought less-heralded changes, too, including an elaborate system to deal with the saltwater, which is actually a polluted mix of naturally occurring brine, hydrocarbons, radioactive materials and more. Billions of gallons of it are produced by oil drilling and pumping each year.

Haines begins his story with an account of how one of the saltwater tanks got hit by lightning, whereupon it burst, sending its toxic contents spilling down washes and gullies and into a river, a lake, and one farmer’s groundwater. This was not an unusual occurrence.

The damage to [Larry] Novak’s land, while dramatic, isn’t uncommon in the North Dakota oil fields. More than 50 saltwater spills happen each year in McKenzie County, when tanker trucks crash, pipelines leak, or well pads or disposal sites catch fire or otherwise malfunction. Many spills are contained on well pads and at disposal sites. But others drain into fields, farmyards and roadways. Novak worried about his pasture, a water source for cows, deer, pheasants and more. And he feared the cumulative impact of so many saltwater spills in a county that is home to hundreds of streams and springs, and where farmers and ranchers often rely on water wells for livestock and themselves.

This, of course, puts the residents of the oil-rich state in the same bind as the poor folks down in Cancer Alley in Louisiana: What do you want, your job or your drinking water? Of course, in North Dakota, a lot of people got rich before being forced into that choice.

But today, even Republicans in deep-red McKenzie County are raising questions. One morning during my visit this May, I met Karolin Jappe, McKenzie County Emergency Manager, at her office in the county courthouse. She sat at her desk in a red-white-and-blue blouse, with a red-white-and-blue lanyard around her neck. She had a Trump-Pence 2020 coffee mug reading ‘Keep America Great.’ As coordinator of local response efforts, many of which come from volunteer fire companies, Jappe is often on scene after a tanker truck crashes and dumps wastewater, or a saltwater disposal site gets hit by lightning (which can happen several times a year), or a saltwater pipeline bursts a leak. The walls of Jappe’s office are covered with diagrams of well pads and county road maps. Next to her desk, she keeps stocks of extra-large sanitary wipes and emergency spill kits.

“I love the oil field,” Jappe told me. “But saltwater is my enemy.”

She is especially concerned about the damage that can come if pipes injecting saltwater a mile underground were to leak. She told me she is not confident underground aquifers, let alone fields and pastures impacted by surface spills, are safe. She worries that residents don’t have enough protection under current oil-field oversight by state agencies that can’t keep pace with development.
“We’re their lab rats,” Jappe said.

It’s easy to dismiss the people in Haines’ story as suckers who went for the quick buck. But, in the 1980s, American farmers were in such awful shape that Willie Nelson and Neil Young started an annual benefit concert for them. So along come the oil companies wanting to drill, and offering bags of cash for the right to do so.

 It’s awfully glib to say that the farmers should have refused it , especially with foreclosures and bankruptcy auctions happening every couple of hectares down the road. Now, though, these bills are coming due. Haines has caught the beginnings of what may be a serious political uprising by people of the land against the power of the industry that made some of them rich. Haines recalls a speech given by Art Link, one of the state’s few Democratic governors in this half-century.

Link, a McKenzie County native who is buried in Alexander, just eight miles south of the lightning-strike saltwater spill on Larry Novak’s land, gave what was then considered a defining speech for the state’s ideals. In it, he said he supported development of coal mining in the southern part of the state, but only in a way that protected land and water. “And when we are through with that and the landscape is quiet again …” Link said, “let those who follow and repopulate the land be able to say, ‘our grandparents did their job well. The land is as good and, in some cases, better than before.’”