Goals for today:
***Get out your "Bakken Business" readings for me to check annotations***
AGENDA
1.In your groups, do one more Station from yesterday's activity.
While still in your groups, discuss the questions on the first page of this handout.
2. Whole class Discussion of homework assignment "Bakken Business":
3. EXIT TICKET TO BREAK:
Answer the BIG QUESTION: Is the oil extraction in the Bakken progress? What is your emerging opinion on fracking? Is this an energy option that the US should continue to use?
4. Show of hands: Who wants to take notes on paper? Otherwise, download the Environmental Ethics Lecture Notes Form
5. Read the first page of the notes form and follow the directions to Starter 4.2. (Complete starter 4.2 on your Energy and Place Starters Google Doc!)
For further reading....
IMPORTANT DETAILS ABOUT BURNING NATURAL GAS (as mentioned in "Bakken Business")
NEW TOWN, N.D. — Across western North Dakota, hundreds of fires rise above fields of wheat and sunflowers and bales of hay. At night, they illuminate the prairie skies like giant fireflies.
They are not wildfires caused by lightning strikes or other acts of nature, but the deliberate burning of natural gas by oil companies rushing to extract oil from the Bakken shale field and take advantage of the high price of crude. The gas bubbles up alongside the far more valuable oil, and with less economic incentive to capture it, the drillers treat the gas as waste and simply burn it.
Every day, more than 100 million cubic feet of natural gas is flared this way — enough energy to heat half a million homes for a day.
The flared gas also spews at least two million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year, as much as 384,000 cars or a medium-size coal-fired power plant would emit, alarming some environmentalists.
All told, 30 percent of the natural gas produced in North Dakota is burned as waste. No other major domestic oil field currently flares close to that much, though the practice is still common in countries like Russia, Nigeria and Iran.
