Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
Bill Hand, left, and Deborah Hanson spoke to the Board of Oil and Gas Conservation on Wednesaday about public access to information gathered by the board.
Two members of the Northern Plains Resource Council appealed to the Montana Board of Oil and Gas Conservation on Wednesday to make information on oil spills and gas flaring more readily accessible to the public.
“We thought perhaps you could take a look at what North Dakota does,” Deborah Hanson told the board during one of its regular meetings in Billings.
Hanson, of Miles City, and Bill Hand, of Nye, said Montana could also take some pointers from Wyoming, where such information is posted online and updated often.
Two board members briefly asked questions after Hanson and Hand spoke, and board administrator Jim Halvorson told them the board is aware of the need to make more information available.
In regard to data on gas flaring, he said, “we will look into doing whatever we can to make that easier” to access.
But information on oil spills is more difficult to collect because it is compiled by whatever agency, entity or Indian tribe has authority on the land where the spill occurs, Halvorson said.
He said the board used to collect what spill data it could on an annual basis and store it in a box. It is looking into recording spill data “that could someday be accessible to the public,” he said.
Hanson and Hand said the board collects a lot of information, but it is hard to extract and is often available only in hard copy at the board office in Billings, which is a huge deterrent to people living in remote areas of Eastern Montana.
The meeting was the first opportunity for NPRC members to hear from the board since Eric VanderBeek, chair of the NPRC’s Oil and Gas Task Force, wrote to the board in August to lay out their concerns.
North Dakota, the letter continued, “provides its citizens access to an online database for every spill report through the Department of Health’s website. We recommend that Montana aim to match—or, improve upon—this standard of data transparency.”
Hanson, a member of the Oil and Gas Task Force, told the board that Gage Cartographics, of Bozeman, created an interactive online map showing the location of every oil spill in North Dakota from 2000 to 2013. If you click on any of the hundreds of red dots scattered across the Gage map of North Dakota, it tells you details of that spill.
When Gage tried making a similar map of Montana, Hanson said, it quickly realized it was impossible because of the lack of public information here.
Hand, who lives in Nye but whose family owns mineral rights on land near Volborg in Custer County, said he understands that the flaring of gas at well sites “is part of the operation,” but he said North Dakota, Wyoming and Alaska all do more than Montana to prevent unnecessary flaring.
At any rate, the owners of mineral rights should be able to find out how much gas is being flared, he said.
“I’d sure like to know how much we’re losing,” he said.
In his letter to the board, VanderBeek also asked for the strengthening of the regulatory process for obtaining a flaring exemption. Current rules give the board of oil and gas too much flexibility in deciding when to grant exemptions, he said.
Halvorson told Hanson and Hand that the board has recently begun adding some data to its website in regard to flaring, partly to make it easier for the board itself to track that data.
He also told them he found it interesting that the letter from VanderBeek made reference to recommendations on data collection made by the Legislative Audit Committee, which conducted a performance audit of the oil and gas board’s regulatory program in 2011.
“Nothing in that audit report is making data collection easier,” he said, without elaborating. “On that point, we feel your pain more than you can imagine.”
