Source: NASA
A set of NASA images from the Suomi polar-orbiting satellite has been getting some traffic today, driven by an article by Radiolab co-host Robert Krulwich. It shows bright lights from the Bakken oil field in North Dakota, looking like a metropolis where maps show little settlement. The images are very cool, especially for energy/infrastructure nerds. There's obvious points to be made about human impacts on the planet and "visible from space" cliches. And there's the deeper observation that what you see is a result of state regulatory decisions. As our shale gas regulatory maps show, North Dakota allows wells to flare the natural gas associated with oil production. 29% of such gas was apparently flared in the state last year, contributing greatly to the glow shown in the pictures (though artificial lighting of rigs and worksites is presumably also a factor). These flares lead to carbon emissions without any energy benefit, though from a climate change perspective flaring off gas is better than simply venting it since methane is such a potent GHG. Still, requiring firms to pipe and sell gas rather than flaring it (or, better, charging them the social cost of carbon for the associated emissions and letting them make their own decisions) would make Bakken oil a much cleaner energy source.
But what's most interesting to me are the patterns on the map. East of Williston, where the wells are densest, they line up in mostly-regular linear patterns. Zoom in to see them - you can also clearly see the outline of elongated dam-created reservoirs on the Missouri River.
The first priority in well siting (after complying with setback rules and other regulations) is the estimated productivity of the underlying formation. Geologic formations don't make neat lines, at least not at the scales shown in the image. The only thing that makes lines that regular is people.
If I'm right, the pattern you see is the product of two things. First, the same horizontal drilling technology that makes drilling in thin formations like the Bakken shale possible also gives a lot more flexibility in surface well siting. Since wellbores traverse thousands of horizontal feet underground, the well need not be directly above the target rock in the formation. In fact, it's possible to put multiple wells on a single pad, with each extending out in a different direction. A single wellpad may draw oil from a huge area. This reduces the surface impacts of well development. It also means wells can be located where it's most efficient. That, in many cases, is close to roads. Fracking a well requires a lot of water, sand, machinery, and people. Not having to cut a new road for all that, over which all of it must travel in and out, can save a lot of time and money. Take a look at this intersection just west of Williston for an example: three drilling rigs within a mile, all directly off existing roads. Pipeline infrastructure likely also plays a role in well siting decisions.
And those roads (and probably the pipelines too) are where they are in large part because they trace the borders between divisions (sections and townships) of the Public Land Survey System (PLSS) - at least where the land is flat. The PLSS, proposed by Thomas Jefferson and begun in 1785, is the system by which much of the country (and almost all of the West and Midwest) was surveyed, divided, and allocated by the Federal government. Anyone who has spent time in the West will recognize its ground-level effects: the size and shape of pieces of land, right-angle road intersections, and the ubiquity of roads named "Baseline" are but a few. Anyone who has taken a cross-country flight in growing season will recognize it too, as farms growing different crops highlight the survey boundaries like a game board.
But these images of the Bakken field lit at night make the human organization of land through the PLSS visible from space (...there's the cliche). Of course cities show up from space, but at that scale they appear almost organic. Some oil fields elsewhere in the world burn just as brightly, but systems of land division there are more chaotic, so patterns don't emerge as readily. For example, look at this picture of the Eagle Ford shale in Texas - it's much less obviously structured since Texas (or at least south Texas) was apportioned by Spanish land grants. Other than long interstate highways, I don't know of anything else that can be seen from space that's so unmistakably the product of the human need to divide and rationalize. The fact that the decisions that led to these patterns were made over 200 years ago makes the images even more mind-boggling.
I'll let you decide whether that's beautiful or terrible.
Word of the day: Cadastral (having to do with the boundaries of land parcels)
