Where Republicans Are Starting to Worry About Big Oil - POLITICO

ALEXANDER, North Dakota — It was just past 3 a.m. when the lightning struck and the first tank exploded into flames.

Larry Novak, a third-generation farmer, shot out of bed. Novak has volunteered on the Alexander Rural Fire Protection District since his junior year of high school, in 1978. The crew covers hundreds of square miles of cattle pasture and fertile fields stretching across western North Dakota. On that early morning last September, Novak didn’t have far to go. The lightning had landed a mile northeast of his own farmhouse, just over a hill and a highway.

It hit a saltwater disposal facility, which included a group of tanks holding contaminated water produced by the oil fracking that has redefined McKenzie County. The county, a sea of soil larger than some eastern states, had been one of the last places in North Dakota to be settled by homesteaders, just over a century ago. Cut off on three sides by the Missouri, Little Missouri and Yellowstone rivers, the county remained an agricultural outpost into the 21st century. But over the past 15 years, an oil rush of mammoth proportions has planted more than 5,000 wells deep beneath the prairie, drawing up enough oil to make McKenzie the top-producing county in some months in the United States.

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.

The saltwater disposal facility east of Novak’s farmhouse, one of more than 100 sites around the county that store wastewater until it is injected a mile underground, sits on a rise on a neighbor’s piece of land. Novak was the first to arrive, some 15 minutes after the lightning struck.

“I roll in, and I see that tank on fire,” Novak said. He knew there were more than a dozen other tanks on the site, each holding as much as 16,000 gallons. Lightning had apparently hit a rod installed to keep strikes away from the tanks. But the force of the strike was so strong the current apparently jumped a grounding wire and hit the first tank, igniting gases inside. Novak watched a second tank, then a third, explode, and soon the prairie night was awash in orange.

The tanks burned near Novak’s prized pasture, home to fresh-water springs and, at that moment, roughly 60 head of cattle. A shallow gully running through the pasture continues to Camp Creek, which joins Timber Creek, which flows into Lake Sakakawea, a reservoir formed by a dam on the Missouri River. By 9 am, the sun was high and the storm was long gone, but Novak could see saltwater flowing from the tanks down the gully and toward his spring.

“It went right to that open water,” Novak said. “And I knew things weren’t good.”

Over the following weeks, industry clean-up specialists dug dirt, built berms and installed pumps to try to decontaminate the pasture and its springs. But nearly three months later, a water sample taken far down the gully, where it broadens into a wetland, contained 149,000 parts per million of chloride — 600 times the advised limit, and a clear indication that saltwater and its dangerous contaminants were still present.

The damage to 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.

McKenzie County’s wastewater legacy

More than 1,250 spills of toxic wastewater from fracking operations have been reported in McKenzie County since 2011. About 80 percent of spills were characterized as “contained,” where spills were dammed, excavated or vacuumed up by “super sucker” trucks. Spills of super-salty wastewater can contaminate soil and groundwater, kill vegetation, ruin crops and disrupt aquatic ecosystems.

“Water is such an integral part of this county,” he said. “Everyone knows the value of it.”

Novak, like the vast majority of his neighbors and North Dakotans, has long supported the oil industry, grateful for the huge economic benefit it has brought to his county and state. But even before the lightning strike, the toll of so much oil-industry damage had him chafing for more accountability for companies that now control so much land among the farms and fields. With each passing year, Novak has seen more of his neighbors question the consequences of their own unbridled support of industry. Novak is a Democrat, but most of his neighbors — like most North Dakotans — are Republicans, and they find themselves in the unfamiliar position of wondering if the government ought to do more.

Fifteen years into their historic oil boom, people on the ground in McKenzie County — which voted more than 80 percent in favor of Donald Trump in 2020 — are caught balancing a conflict of conservative ideals, weighing their individual property rights against the pro-business policies their deep-red state also embraces. Increasingly, local landowners in McKenzie, including Republicans, are pushing state leaders for more regulation and more accountability from the oil companies in their county. Even their modest efforts are sparking tension with state officials eager to continue boosting the oil business and to keep the boom going. And the same debate about property rights versus big business promises to shape an emerging resource question in North Dakota: Who should control so-called “pore space,” the empty areas deep underground that are projected to be key to future energy development?

Oil was first harvested in North Dakota in 1951, with bouts of drilling into the 1980s. Conventional wells with straight-down shafts reached easily accessible pockets of the fossil fuel. The early booms brought some profit, but crops and cattle still anchored the state economy.

Beginning in 2006, though, a powerful combination of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling — a technique commonly described as “fracking” — opened vast deposits of oil sealed within the Bakken Formation, tight shale 10,000 feet beneath the prairie. With an early frenzy that helped to redefine global oil politics, thousands of wells produced more than a million barrels a day, making North Dakota the second-leading oil producer in the nation, after only Texas.

I first visited McKenzie County in 2014, during the peak of the drilling boom; I walked 80 miles through the epicenter of the action to report about the collision of a century-long agricultural way of life with the arrival of industry. Many of the people I met came from homesteader families that had lived through a hard century, defined by cycles of drought and competitive global markets that claimed many family farms. Those still farming when the boom arrived were eager for the economic diversity, and relative certainty, that an oil economy could bring. And, in the largely Republican county, most I met shared a sense that natural resources are an economic asset meant to be harvested. Not all landowners here held the mineral rights for the oil beneath their land, but even for those who didn’t, the boom would bring jobs that could help keep younger generations around.

State leaders welcomed the industry with open arms, and the operation felt unstoppable. One day, I talked with a young man working for ConocoPhillips who was servicing the casings on a polished rod that connects the pump to the underground parts of a well. The crude oil from the well is converted to gasoline, but also a range of petroleum products that fuel our daily lives. The man, his hands covered in grease, squinted beneath his hard hat and posed a question to me. “Who’s willing to give up their big screen TVs and Xboxes and all that other stuff?” he said. “The hard ugly truth is you need this. It just has to be done.” During those early drilling days, I heard little talk — among oil workers, and farmers, and even activists in the state — about potential environmental damage.

So, when I returned to McKenzie County this May, seven years later, I had questions about what the drilling had done to the natural terrain, and the toll that took on locals living within it. I knew from afar that the boom had created a mature oil field in North Dakota, with more than 15,000 wells delivering as many as 1.5 million barrels of oil a day by late 2019. Even so, on a warm spring evening with soft blue sky, as I drove west across Lake Sakakawea and entered McKenzie County, I was struck by how complete the conversion to an industrial zone appeared. Fields and pastures still stretched toward the setting sun. Yet in each direction oil pumps punctuated the terrain, and it seemed nearly every big intersection was home to a pipeline hub, or natural gas compressor station, or one of the hundreds of saltwater disposal sites that kept everything moving.

Today, tax revenues from oil operations make up more than 50 percent of North Dakota’s annual budget. Republican leaders in the state, who hold all federal and statewide elected positions, have continued to push for a carbon-based economy, as North Dakota now depends on oil more than any other state. The North Dakota Legacy Fund, an investment account approved by North Dakota voters to guard some oil tax revenue for future expenses, is worth more than $8 billion. Oil tax revenue from that and other sources has buoyed schools and health care across the state, lowered income taxes for residents, and funded everything from flood containment systems in eastern North Dakota to major highway projects.

The farms and pastures of McKenzie County sit atop the sweet spot of the Bakken, and this April the county produced more than 40 percent of the oil in North Dakota. McKenzie County is just as Republican as the rest of the state, and Republicans hold the state senate and house seats for District 39, which includes much of the county. “Even the Democrats in this county don’t dare tell someone that they’re a Democrat,” Dennis Johnson, a rancher and attorney in Watford City, whom I first met in 2014, told me this spring.

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.”

Oil operations, from well-drilling to production and transportation, are overseen by state agencies, including the powerful North Dakota Industrial Commission. Its board includes three elected officials, all Republicans: Gov. Doug Burgum, Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem and Agriculture Commissioner Doug Goehring. NDIC and other state officials say they have provisions in place to ensure that things are done right the first time or are quickly corrected when not. Yet saltwater spills occur so regularly that local officials and many landowners impacted by the spills are sounding the alarm and, in a rare move, have begun asking for more regulation of the industry.

Jappe is frustrated that state officials aren’t a bigger ally in that battle — or even in helping her do her job. She has tried without success to get a map showing all saltwater pipelines that the industrial commission has authorized in the county.

“I can’t even get a list of them,” Jappe said. “The NDIC won’t give it to me.”

A spokesperson for the NDIC’s Department of Mineral Resources said the North Dakota Century Code requires that all geographic details of oil field pipelines be kept confidential by the NDIC, except by request of an individual property owner or the state tax commissioner.

Landowners, Jappe said, are therefore too reliant on the companies themselves to clean up any accidents.

A cascade of companies, from global titans such as Exxon, Hess and ConocoPhillips, to dozens of smaller operators, play various roles in the industry here, whether drilling or producing oil, servicing wells, burying pipeline or hauling wastewater.

“Sometimes you have a really good company that will clean it up. Sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you don’t ever find out about it,” Jappe said. “I wish saltwater had a little bit more regulation. There just needs to be more accountability.”

Jappe would like the state to require tanker trucks hauling saltwater to carry placards that indicate the toxic load. She would like to see more state health and environmental quality inspectors on site, including some who live and work in McKenzie County year-round, as many now travel from the eastern part of the state for shorter stays.

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.

During my time in McKenzie County this May, I met only one person who said they wished the oil industry had never come. But plenty told of the difficult balance they’ve had to strike between two concepts they embrace: the right of business to flourish and their own need to protect their property.

“It’s the crux of the biggest conflict you can have in McKenzie County,” said Joel Brown, whose family started an oil-field services company during earlier drilling in the 1980s. Brown, who serves on the District 39 Republican Party Executive Committee, has heard plenty of conservatives complain of incidents and accidents on their land. But he was quick to say those people also have a responsibility to make sure they’re adequately compensated when negotiating agreements with oil companies who access their land.

“Ultimately, it is in the hands of the landowners to make sure they’re making good deals on their own behalf,” Brown said.

Some local officials, however, say the government needs to stick up for the interests of the individual landowners.

Early one morning in May, one of those officials, Kathy Skarda, strolled into Dixie’s Café, a small restaurant in Keene, ground zero of the oil field in McKenzie County.

“Holy smokes,” she said, “looks like we’ve got lots of people here.”

Dixie’s, set in a house a block behind a gas station popular with tanker trucks on Highway 23, is still a gathering spot for local ranchers and farmers, and she found the center table full of familiar faces, old-timers and younger people enjoying a bottomless cup of coffee.

Skarda, described in the local newspaper as “known for her tickled pink nature,” made a lap around the oval table, squeezing some on the shoulder, patting others on the back. She asked one man when his family would be branding their calves, and an older woman whether she’d gotten her flower garden planted.

Skarda grew up in the 1970s near Squaw Gap, just west of Theodore Roosevelt National Park’s North Unit, the badlands preserve south of Watford City. She and her siblings rode horses from the family farm to a one-room schoolhouse. Retired now after years working at the local bank, Skarda still wakes early to feed cattle and fix fence on the ranch near Keene where she and her husband, Gary, raised three children.

Skarda is grateful for the oil boom’s economic benefits. But more than a decade ago she started to worry about the ills that came with them, from increased domestic violence to crime and congestion, in addition to saltwater spills and other environmental pollution.

“Heartache about the oil field,” she said, led her, while still working at the bank, to first run for a seat on the McKenzie County Commission that she has held since 2014.

Skarda has since won more votes than any other candidate in her two elections, and she now serves as vice-chair of the commission, which manages local resources, from highways and roads to a county fairground that hosts an annual rodeo. At a recent meeting, she asked pointed questions about county balance sheets. And she took a decisive position mid-meeting, when conversation turned to fencing requirements around freshwater ponds, built by some landowners to sell water for oil-drilling operations. Skarda argued that no exceptions should be given to existing requirements to put chain-link fence around ponds for safety.

McKenzie County is not an openly political place. In dozens of conversations during my two visits, I found people don’t often preach one particular doctrine or another. In part, I suspect, this is because so many share conservative views about central issues. And there has been, given the scale of saltwater damage and other issues, relatively little public pushback. But in recent years, Skarda, so well connected with her neighbors and their interests, has become a public watchdog, speaking out from her post on the county commission against the oil industry when things go wrong.

County commission seats are technically nonpartisan. Skarda, a Republican, said she is guided by doing what’s right for constituents, whether making sure their tax money is spent wisely, or their land is protected.

“We just want the state to hold the industry accountable,” Skarda told me. “It’s very frustrating for the citizens when it’s happening on their doorstep.”

I joined Skarda one morning for a drive from Watford City west, then south, toward her childhood home near Squaw Gap, a part of the county relatively untouched by oil. On the way, as we sped along Highway 85, she pointed north toward the horizon and mentioned by name a farmer I’d never met, as though I knew him as well as she did. “He has issues with waters and ponds and people doing stuff,” Skarda said. “It left him a big mess.”

Rolling south on Highway 15, she talked about a pipeline leak in 2006 that dumped one million gallons of saltwater into Charbonneau Creek, causing damage that continues today.

The McKenzie County Commission controls some planning and zoning ordinances that can impact oil field operations. Skarda and some other commissioners have used that platform to question some oil field projects, including an injection site for solid waste, a plan to expand a radioactive dumping ground and another for access to a pit for polluted earth.

Skarda, in particular, has been vocal about saltwater spills damaging soil and freshwater sources. The brine that comes up during oil production from the Bakken has some of the highest salinity in the nation, the result of salt deposits in the underground rock that make it many times saltier than sea water. When spilled, it can render soil so salty that plants die of thirst, even when there is plenty of water, or the soil becomes brick hard. Tests of North Dakota soil have shown that saltwater damage can last decades, seeping and spreading. And it can travel in the surface water so common in McKenzie County.

How freshwater becomes toxic waste

Forcing oil to flow from a Bakken well begins with a multi-day blast of 200,000 gallons of water mixed with sand and chemicals. The high-pressure freshwater fractures the rock, while sand particles prop open cracks, creating space for oil, gas — and contaminated wastewater — to flow up to the surface.

The industry and state regulators say saltwater spills are closely monitored and most often quickly contained. Skarda, having tracked closely saltwater spills and their impacts for more than a decade, doubts that.

“It has to be going into Lake Sakakawea, into the Yellowstone,” she told me. “It’s going everywhere, in my opinion.”

Skarda and other commissioners have been open to considering proposals from the Salted Lands Council, an organization formed by landowners that is encouraging oil producing counties to set aside some tax revenue to create an inventory of land damaged by saltwater spills, so that companies, or the state, can be held accountable to repair the land later.

Skarda’s local advocacy drew statewide attention this April, when she was the subject of discussion on a statewide radio broadcast between talk show host Scott Hennen and Lynn Helms, the powerful director of the NDIC’s Department of Mineral Resources, who for more than a decade has publicly championed the oil industry. Even though the McKenzie County Commission had only questioned certain specific permits over which it has jurisdiction, Hennen asked why commissioners would do anything at all to get in the way of further oil industry growth. Said Helms: “It is a real struggle to move forward in McKenzie County these days. They need to sit back and think about … what brought all these wonderful people to Watford City, what made it a central spot on the map again, and get back to embracing the industry that made McKenzie County great.”

Hennen mentioned Skarda, in particular, referring to her by her initials, “K.S.”

“That county is well on its way to a wonderful future,” Helm said. “If nothing else, government needs to stay out of the way.”

I sat with Skarda in Dixie’s Café a few weeks after the radio show aired. She said she was flabbergasted by the criticism. “I’ve never talked to Lynn Helms. I’ve never talked to Scott Hennen,” she said. “And they start talking about me?”

Skarda said she received dozens of supportive phone calls from around the county after the radio show aired. She said the commission had just been doing its job. Commissioners had declined, for example, to pay for the paving of a county road that a company needed for a project. They also questioned another company looking for access to an oil-well waste dump about an access road permit and a plan to mitigate odor.

Helms’ criticism only seemed to sharpen Skarda’s resolve.

“If we are impeding progress by making sure to be holding the industry accountable,” Skarda said, “bring it on.”

So far, Skarda walks a fine line, buoyed by cheers of support she says she receives from her constituent neighbors, but operating within what has become, for all practical purposes, a political monoculture. Republican peers who represent the county in the state legislature, and others locally, such as Brown, who also serves on the McKenzie County Commission, encourage the industry and the political powers that support it.

“I believe we can co-exist with agriculture and industry throughout the productive life of the Bakken,” Brown told me.

Fifty years ago, Democrats controlled many levers of power in North Dakota, and there was a broader political debate about the costs and benefits of coal mining — the emerging, and controversial, industry of the day. As the state expanded mining, Art Link, a two-term Democratic governor in the 1970s, called for greater consideration of environmental impacts. 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.’”

There is little Democratic presence in oil country, but Lisa DeVille, who lives just 15 miles from Skarda in the small city of Mandaree, has tried to focus on environmental concerns to gain a political foothold. Mandaree sits at the east end of McKenzie County and on the west edge of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, home to members of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation. Last year, DeVille ran as a Democrat for state senate in a district that includes the reservation.

Twenty miles east of Mandaree, a native settlement named Elbowoods was flooded in the 1950s when the Garrison Dam was built to form the Lake Sakakawea reservoir. Among the people forced to move was DeVille’s grandmother, Julia White Eagle (Charging-Mandan). Long after, she would walk the banks west of Lake Sakakawea picking plums and juneberries, and she often took DeVille along. DeVille can remember her grandmother’s concern when oil companies arrived in 2006. “I don’t know if we’ll have plums and juneberries anymore,” White Eagle told her.

DeVille has spent much of the decade since her grandmother passed away warning of environmental damage, including a particularly large spill in 2014 near Bear Den Bay, just five miles north of Mandaree. A million gallons of saltwater flowed from a pipeline through a ravine on the shore of Lake Sakakawea, less than a mile from an intake pump for the Mandaree water system.

DeVille, who later would earn a bachelor’s degree in environmental science, assisted scientists from Duke University conducting a test of the spill’s impact. Markers from water samples confirmed contamination downstream from the site of the spill above Bear Den Bay. In addition to oil-well brine, the Duke research found high amounts of radioactive elements from drilling operations that remain in the ecosystem for thousands of years.

DeVille, convinced she’d have little success among non-Native communities, limited her senate campaign last year to the reservation, which makes up less than half of the district. She focused her message on better oversight of oil field operations, which she said should have been more robust from the beginning.

DeVille easily won precincts on tribal land — but she got just as thoroughly beaten elsewhere in the district. The Republican incumbent, Jordan Kannianen, held his seat with nearly 70 percent of the vote. Despite the hard loss, DeVille was heartened recently when a tribal council member was elected after running on many of the environmental issues DeVille has championed. And DeVille is hopeful the Biden administration and its Environmental Protection Agency will press North Dakota officials on environmental issues.

In June, she sat directly across the table from EPA Administrator Michael Regan during more than an hour of conversation. She urged Regan to do something about saltwater spills, and she gave him a printed copy of the 2016 Duke report about the pollution at Bear Den Bay.

“He needs to see what we live with,” DeVille told me.

DeVille is not sure if she will run for state senate again in 2024. Her attempt last year, she said, accomplished all a Democrat can hope for in McKenzie County.

“I knew what the outcome would be,” DeVille said. “But I wanted people to know.”

Doug Burgum, a Republican who has held office since 2016, announced this spring an ambitious plan to make North Dakota a carbon-neutral state by 2030. Speaking to a crowd of oil executives gathered for a conference, Burgum promoted a plan to sequester carbon dioxide deep underground, while encouraging yet more oil and gas production. So, the land in McKenzie County, no matter how such a future takes shape, will continue to be re-engineered.

“There’s a realization that you have to exploit it, because that’s the resource,” said Mark Jendrysik, a professor of political science at the University of North Dakota. “The need to make the land pay is very strong here.”

Essential to Burgum’s plan is so-called “pore space,” cavities deep underground that occur naturally, or are created when oil and gas are removed. Such space is already used in McKenzie County to store saltwater and for a process called enhanced oil recovery. Industry and political leaders see pore space as crucial for sequestering carbon, a process that could help control climate change.

Early positioning by corporations to access pore space has sparked another round of intra-party debate among Republicans. Unlike rights to minerals such as gas and oil, which can be separated from surface land rights, underground pore space is typically considered in U.S. law to be property of the person who owns the land above. The landowner has claim to any pore space between the topsoil and the Earth’s core, more than 1,800 miles below.

In 2019, the North Dakota Industrial Commission sponsored a pore space law supported by the oil and gas industry. Critics of the law said that it stripped landowners of compensation from companies accessing that space, and it prevented them from seeking compensation for nuisances and inconvenience from the surface access to it. An association of landowners, including some in McKenzie County, sued, and a state court judge ruled the law unconstitutional. The law, Judge Anthony Benson wrote, gave “pore space to the oil and gas industry, for free, under the guise of the North Dakota Industrial Commission.”

The commission returned with a new bill that became law this spring that focuses more on the issue of natural gas storage. That law, which has not yet been challenged, does provide compensation to landowners, but it could force some to allow access whether they want to or not. The law, which amended the North Dakota Century Code, passed the house 72-19 — but eight Republicans broke ranks to vote with Democrats against it. House Rep. Rick Becker, founder of the conservative Bastiat Caucus, said he saw the vote as a collision of conservative principles. Given the choice, he said he chose individual property rights over a pro-business position meant to help industry.

“It’s a division between those looking philosophically, constitutionally, at the issue, and others looking at the importance of the energy industry,” Becker said.

In McKenzie County, state Sen. Dale Patten, who holds a seat on the powerful energy committee, joined the majority supporting industry on both the 2019 and 2021 versions of the bill. Some McKenzie County landowners, Republicans among them, felt betrayed by his stance, particularly on the first version of the law.

“They were mad about that,” said Gretchen Stenehjem, a Watford City businesswoman who serves as Republican Party chair of District 39. Stenehjem is a strong supporter of the oil industry — she downplayed the occurrence of saltwater spills as rare — but she doesn’t support the pore space legislation, or any attempt to take compensation for that asset from landowners.

“It’s a dilemma for a conservative,” Stenehjem said.

I met Patten on a sunny afternoon at Door 204, a coffee shop, art gallery and postal center on Main Street in Watford City, to talk about how he balances energy industry interests with those of his landowner neighbors. The future of North Dakota, and McKenzie County, Patten said, will only be more industrial. He envisioned a growing and changing above-ground industry: using natural gas to run on-site server farms for technology companies; opening petrochemical plants to turn petroleum into a range of consumer products; harnessing ethane to power electric plants; building more processing and transportation infrastructure to get North Dakota fossil fuels to market. And he stressed that easy access to pore space would encourage investment in natural gas storage and carbon sequestration.

“How do you ignore that kind of an industry?” Patten said. “You have to say, ‘We’re business friendly.’”

Patten said corporations that lease mineral rights from individuals have a property right, too, and it’s important to protect that. As for his conservative constituents who would like more regulation to protect their land from saltwater spills, Patten said they only occasionally raise concerns with him.

“It usually happens when there’s been a problem,” Patten said. “But I do hear about the benefit, too, and it could be from the same person.”

After Patten and I left Door 204 and stood in the sun on Main Street, he reminded me of his rural roots. His father was a farmer, and Patten earned a degree in agricultural science before becoming a banker. He still raises cattle.

“I’m an ag guy,” Patten said.

But as we parted company and he walked away, I thought of something he said as he had listed ways in which factories, processing plants and underground operations may proliferate above and below the prairie. People in McKenzie County will continue to profit, he had told me. But they may have to give up more control of their property. Patten had explained the future for those living in the prairie oil field in purely political terms.

“Are 100 percent of landowners going to be happy? No,” he said. “Are a majority? I believe yes. Are a super majority? Maybe.”

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