Eric Lipton

Long reliant on coal as a major source of fuel for its electricity-generating plants, Texas is increasingly shifting to natural gas, wind and solar energy, prodded by the improving economics of these alternative sources and by tighter environmental regulation.

The change has brought a degree of progress in cleaning up the air. Two Texas coal-burning plants, targets of an Obama administration policy intended to curb harmful sulfur dioxide emissions, have closed this year. A third, which has supplied power to San Antonio since the 1970s, will be mothballed at the end of this month.

These Texas plants, and a fourth that closed this year, together produced 108,000 tons of sulfur dioxide in 2017, or 39 percent of the total state power plant emissions of the pollutant. That is an extraordinary decline in one year, and more than half of the 194,000-ton reduction called for in the Obama plan from late 2016.

But now, after years of policies that President Donald Trump and others have derisively described as a “war on coal,” the Trump administration has called a timeout on a costly mandate that would have ensured continued improvement in the region’s air quality.

The administration’s target has been an Obama-era rule that would have forced a group of coal-burning plants to install expensive scrubbers to cut sulfur dioxide discharges. For the owner of the W.A. Parish plant, NRG Energy, this would have meant either spending hundreds of millions of dollars to put in two of the huge devices, or shutting down the coal-burning operations there.

Before Scott Pruitt left his post as Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator, the agency notified NRG, as well as the owners of eight other Texas power plants, that the agency was no longer demanding the air pollution retrofits.

Instead, the agency is working out an industry-backed alternative that will require no immediate reductions in air pollution by the Texas plants still in operation.

The result, according to some of the United States’ top air pollution experts, is measurable human and environmental costs.

Even with the recent shutdowns of coal-burning plants, Texas remains one of the top sources of sulfur dioxide emissions.

Every year that the W.A. Parish plant continues to operate as it has been, an estimated 180 people in Texas and surrounding states die prematurely, according to a recent study. Sulfur dioxide, colorless as it comes out of the smoke stacks, turns into tiny sulfate particles as it travels through the air — small enough to pass through the lungs and enter the bloodstream. These particles can cause aggravated asthma, heart and lung disease, and other serious health problems.

For Jennifer Cantu, who lives a few miles from W.A. Parish, the regulatory reversal is deeply personal. The plant pumped 37,649 tons of sulfur dioxide into the air last year, one of the highest levels among power plants in the United States.

“It is the kind of thing you don’t think about at all — until you notice that ugly smell every once in a while,” Cantu said. “And then you remember, ‘There is that plant down there and I wonder: Should my daughters be playing outside?'”

The effects are not limited to the immediate area. Haze created by the plant’s exhaust mars mountaintop views in national forests and wildlife areas, including Caney Creek hundreds of miles away in Arkansas.

No environmental issue has animated Trump more than coal. The president has often portrayed coal as the heart of a lost industrial glory he is determined to restore. And for political as well as economic reasons, he has sided regularly with the industry and users of coal, dismissing much existing environmental regulation as an unjustifiably expensive, job-killing intrusion on the U.S. economy.

The administration said emissions of many pollutants declined in Trump’s first year in office and that it expects the declines to continue. “Despite a misleading narrative, our air is getting cleaner,” said James Hewitt, a spokesman for the EPA.

After decades of political, scientific and economic clashes over the issue, the trade-offs highlighted by Trump’s policy shift in Texas raise a fundamental question: When it comes to the pace of environmental progress in the United States, when is enough enough?

Supporters of Trump’s deregulatory philosophy believe that much of his predecessor’s approach placed unjustifiable costs on companies and the economy. In Texas, the Obama administration relied on a rule governing haze in national parks to push through what critics said was an excessively expensive and unnecessary set of requirements to limit emissions from burning coal.

Texas officials and the power plant operators argue that Texas is much better off without the Obama-era mandate.

They dispute that the sulfur dioxide discharged from the W.A. Parish plant is a health threat, or a major cause of haze in national parks and wildlife areas, despite the conclusions of the Obama-era EPA and certain environmentalists.

And more important, they say, the fact that power plants across Texas are cutting the overall amount of sulfur dioxide in the air at an even faster rate than the Obama EPA had mandated — without being forced to make expensive upgrades — is proof that market forces are a better mechanism than the government for balancing the costs and benefits.

“All of this basically is a question of how quickly do you get the desired results,” said David Knox, a spokesman at NRG, as he gave a walking tour of the sprawling plant.

To discourage the use of coal and promote alternatives, the Obama administration was creative and aggressive in wielding the regulatory tools available to it. On the issue of power generation in Texas, in 2016 the administration employed what is known as the Regional Haze rule, which was intended to deal not with air quality or public health in the immediate vicinity of the power plants, but with the effects their emissions had on visibility in national parklands far downwind.

In this case, downwind included the Caney Creek Wilderness Area near Glenwood, Arkansas, 400 miles north of Houston.

At the OK Cafe in Glenwood on a recent Sunday, the hot topics included the slow start of the deer hunting season and an upcoming runoff election for local sheriff.

No one there had heard of the W.A. Parish plant. The Regional Haze rule was just as unfamiliar.

John Sorrells, a disabled saw mill operator, has seen traces of the haze in question while hunting in the area near Caney Creek. The haze moves in from the south and takes over the hillsides, hitting up against the mountains, which run east to west here.

“If the wind is blowing out of the south for five days or so, you will see it, especially in the summertime,” Sorrells said. “It just covers the hills. It has got to be coming from somewhere.”

The Regional Haze rule, which dates to the Clinton administration, has a goal of gradually cleaning up haze in 156 national parks and wildlife areas, including such landmarks as Yosemite, Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon.

Caney Creek, a pristine, 14,290-acre federally protected wilderness area on the southern edge of Arkansas’ Ouachita National Forest, had its own visibility problems until that trend slowly started to turn around in the last decade. The improvement most likely accelerated this year, with the closing of several major coal-burning power plants in Texas. But the air clarity is still a long way from so-called natural conditions, when views can extend as far as 80 miles.

The W.A. Parish plant, a 2016 EPA assessment found, was noticeably causing haze at Caney Creek 22 days a year, and was a contributing factor in haze there on a total of 54 days.

NRG called the EPA calculations “fundamentally flawed,” disputing that W.A. Parish affects visibility at Caney Creek. But the agency’s findings gave the Obama administration legal justification to step in and propose mandating the installation of scrubbers on a power plant more than 400 miles away.

Hundreds of buttons, dials and gauges blink, buzz and slide in one of the control rooms at the W.A. Parish plant, the central nervous system of a 4,900-acre site that allows the crews to watch as coal is ignited by an enormous fireball inside the boiler.

The goal is to hit just the right temperature, about 3,000 degrees, as the steam generator turns turbines with so much power that the entire complex vibrates amid a deafening roar.

One of Parish’s four coal-burning boilers already has a scrubber, which douses the emerging exhaust with a mixture of water and limestone, extracting most of the sulfur dioxide. But the other three coal-burning units have no scrubber.

Parish’s control room monitors demonstrate in real time the difference a scrubber can make: The unit that has one was discharging 272 pounds of sulfur dioxide per hour from the 500-foot smokestacks. A separate unit with no scrubber was pumping out 3,250 pounds per hour.

Stephen Hedge, the Parish plant’s manager, said it had already invested a tremendous amount into cleaning up its air discharges.

“We have got a lot of environmental controls on these plants,” he said, detailing past efforts at Parish to significantly cut pollutants such as nitrogen oxide and mercury.

Most significant, NRG in 2016 completed a $1 billion project — the largest of its kind in the world — that curbs the impact the plant has on climate change. Equipment collects some of the carbon dioxide generated by one of the four coal-burning units so it can be reused by injecting it into the ground to increase oil and gas production at nearby well sites.

In the debate over how much more money should be spent to protect the environment, Texas residents have much at stake, said Daniel Cohan, an associate professor of environmental engineering at Rice University in Houston, and George D. Thurston, a professor of environmental medicine at New York University.

Cohan estimated in a study published in October that Parish causes 180 premature deaths a year, based on a detailed analysis of emissions from the plant in the summer of 2015. An estimated 120 of those premature deaths would be avoided if scrubbers were installed on the plant as the Obama administration proposed, Cohan said.

Thurston produced his own study that examined the health benefits of the Obama plan in greater detail.

Lowering emissions at nine Texas power plants targeted by the Obama-era EPA, including Parish, would mean 1,300 fewer cases a year of acute bronchitis, as well as about 100,000 fewer lost workdays from related illnesses and 125 fewer admissions a year to area hospitals for heart conditions, he concluded.

Hoping to drive home the point to Pruitt, the former EPA head, who is from Oklahoma, Thurston prepared a summary showing how the Obama policies would also benefit Oklahoma residents, given that air pollution from Texas often blows in that direction.

The bottom line: Hundreds fewer Oklahomans would die prematurely each year, according to a chart that Thurston passed to Pruitt during a June 2017 meeting, where Thurston and other public health experts urged Pruitt not to reverse the Obama administration’s proposed order demanding plant upgrades under the Regional Haze rule.

“People in your own state won’t get these health benefits from cleaner air if you don’t follow through on this,” Thurston said he told Pruitt.

Pruitt’s response, Thurston said, was blunt.

“This is a visibility rule,” Pruitt said. “Therefore the health impacts are irrelevant.”

The agency a few months later notified Texas that it was rejecting the Obama-era proposal. W.A. Parish and the eight other coal-burning plants in Texas would no longer face specific orders mandating air pollution upgrades.

Environmental groups sued late last year to try to block the rollback. But even while this lawsuit has been pending, coal-burning power plants in the state have been shutting down for reasons beyond the potential costs of complying with the Obama policy.

Allan Koenig, a vice president at Vistra Energy, which owns three of the coal-burning plants that have shut down in Texas this year, said his company was shifting to energy generated by renewable sources, such as a solar plant in West Texas that came online this year.

“This is what our customers want,” he said. “So a lot of this is taking place already.”

But the progress that has been made, while considerable, is still far short of what the Obama-era EPA sought.

And even after subtracting the emissions from the Texas coal-burning plants that closed this year, the state remains the top source of sulfur dioxide releases in the country. The 26 states with the lowest sulfur dioxide emissions from power plants — a list that includes California and New York — collectively produced 157,000 tons in 2016. That is less than Texas is still generating on its own, EPA data suggests.

Installing the scrubbers on the six remaining Texas power plants targeted by the Obama administration, including Parish, would mean 11,400 fewer cases a year of asthma attacks spread across 14 states, according to Thurston’s calculations. It would also mean 600 fewer cases of acute bronchitis, about 40 fewer nonfatal heart attacks and about 310 fewer premature deaths every year.

What these numbers suggest, Cohan said, is that now is not the time to stop.

“Just because the water is getting cleaner does not mean we should not stop the industry from dumping huge amounts of hazardous waste in our rivers and lakes,” he said. “Just because cars are getting cleaner does not mean we should not regulate the dirtiest cars and trucks on the road. It is the same thing with coal-burning plants like Parish. Sure, they are cleaner than they used to be. But they are still not clean enough.”

A Regulation Undone: Sulfur Dioxide

THE REGULATION: The Environmental Protection Agency proposed in late 2016 that nine Texas coal-burning power plants upgrade pollution controls to reduce haze in nearby national parks and wilderness areas. The EPA estimated that the move would cut sulfur dioxide pollution by 194,000 tons per year. It would also reduce the risk of heart and respiratory conditions for Texans and for people in nearby states.

THE ROLLBACK: The Trump administration decided in October 2017 to reverse that plan and allow the state and its utilities to come up with their own plan to reduce the haze.

THE CONSEQUENCES: Even without enforcement of the Obama-era plan, three of the nine targeted coal-burning power plants are shutting down this year, resulting in more than half the reduction in sulfur dioxide the Obama administration wanted. It is unclear whether the rest of the reduction will happen, however, since the remaining plants are not required to install or upgrade scrubbers that can cost hundreds of millions of dollars each.

37,649 tons: The amount of sulfur dioxide pumped into the air last year by the W.A. Parish plant just south of Houston — one of the highest levels among power plants in the United States.

400 miles: The distance from Houston to the Caney Creek Wilderness Area near Glenwood, Arkansas, which had a noticeable decline in air clarity and visibility on 22 days a year because of the W.A. Parish plant, a 2016 EPA assessment found, although the company disputes the finding.

11,372: The expected decrease in yearly asthma attacks if emissions were to be cut at six Texas coal-burning plants targeted by the Obama EPA that are still operating without upgrades, according to an air pollution researcher, who also projected about 50,000 fewer lost workdays from related illnesses.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/us/politics/texas-power-plants-coal-war.html" id="9c39d8c4-b3d9-3564-a9f6-c8f97cbf2954">The New York Times</a>.

Citing a 'War on Coal' in Texas, Trump Wages a Counterassault

THOMPSONS, Texas — It is a once-common sight that is now less frequent: A mile-long freight train rolls up to a power plant in Texas — in this case, the W.A. Parish complex near Houston — and then slows to a crawl as its cars, each carrying 100 tons of coal, are tipped one at a time like child’s toys to deliver their load.

Among the risks, according to confidential copies of inspection reports obtained by The New York Times, were plumes of improperly burned methane from oil wells.

One flare that was supposed to be burning gas was not lighted, allowing raw methane to spew into the air. In other spots, waves of benzene, a cancer-causing chemical, were leaking at high levels from a storage tank.

Those hazards and others were not shared with Fort Berthold’s residents at a time when energy production in the region is booming. But the findings underscored the risks involved in the Trump administration’s decision to reverse a rule curbing leaks and flaring, both of which pose dangers and are increasingly common on federal and Indian lands across the West.

Like other communities around the country, Fort Berthold is confronting a tension at the heart of President Donald Trump’s unrelenting push to roll back regulations governing a range of industries: Cutting the costs associated with environmental protection can generate substantial short-term economic gains while producing longer-term and potentially profound health and environmental effects.

The Flaming Landscape

A 75 percent surge in oil production in the past two years has left Fort Berthold lighted by towering shafts of flame. Hundreds of controlled flares burn so bright in the cold night air that the sky turns a weird orange yellow, even as snow falls onto the frozen ground.

An estimated 3 billion cubic feet of gas is burned or released each month here — a volume that could heat about 600,000 homes. Energy companies have figured out a way to capture the oil, but their pipelines are not big enough to handle all the less valuable gas that comes out of the ground. Much of the excess is torched.

As oil and gas operations have intensified in this isolated stretch of North Dakota, so have residents’ concerns. The venting of unburned methane fouls the air with chemicals that are not only in some cases carcinogenic but over the next 100 years will be 30 times as potent a cause of global warming as carbon dioxide. At the same time, the improper burning of methane can create pollutants that cause a variety of respiratory problems.

“My children and grandchildren breathe in this air,” said Lisa DeVille, whose family has lived on the reservation for generations. “How is this going to affect our health?”

DeVille and her husband, Walter, are members of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, the group of tribes living at Fort Berthold. She said they learned last year she had a respiratory condition that her doctor compared to symptoms common among oil field workers. She called it Bakken cough, after the geological formation that is yielding so much oil and gas in the Dakotas and Montana.

The Obama administration, concerned about the effects on health and global warming as well as the wasteful practice of simply burning off energy, moved to curtail leaks and flaring on federal lands and Indian reservations. But in September, under pressure from the energy industry, Trump’s Interior Department eliminated the rule’s most important provisions.

The move was in keeping with Trump’s effort to cut regulatory costs for industry and promote domestic energy production. And it will help protect a remarkable economic boom on this once-impoverished reservation, where the tribal government’s budget — 90 percent of which comes from energy-related sources — has surged over the past 15 years to $330 million from $20 million.

Tribal leaders and state officials here say they are committed to using their regulatory powers to try to confront the flaring and leaks. But in an interview last month, the top tribal oil and gas regulator, Carson Hood Jr., acknowledged he had no plans to cut production until pipelines could be built to handle all the excess gas. That means the intense flaring will probably continue for at least several years, or until the boom in oil drilling subsides.

And the state, which has its own flaring rules, recently moved to reconsider them, as it does not want to chase away any new investment by oil and gas companies, which fuel the state’s economy.

The leaks and flaring are an increasing source of tension at Fort Berthold. Many are focused on the cash from the energy industry that is pouring into community and tribal government coffers. The tribes and some families are paid royalties for each barrel of oil pulled from the ground, revenue that has changed many lives for the better.

“Sovereignty by the barrel,” is the slogan used by the MHA Nation’s Energy Division, which both regulates and promotes oil and gas drilling here.

Yet others are backing a lawsuit challenging Trump’s rollback of the federal rule, while also pressing tribal leaders to move aggressively on their own to confront the consequences of the burning and leaking of gas.

“This is not just an empty worry — this is very real worry,” said Joletta Bird Bear, whose family collects oil production royalties but is pushing for greater regulations on the reservation. “All you have to do is look around and you can see for yourself, the flares burning. They are huge. This is going to impact human life.”

An Upsurge of Wealth

The DeVilles set out for a drive through the Mandaree neighborhood of Fort Berthold to show off both the benefits and the costs that fracking has brought this tiny town.

Oil revenues allowed the MHA Nation to expand its elementary school. The tribes built an elaborate staging area for their annual summertime powwow, which draws hundreds of dancers and drum groups from around the United States and Canada.

Even the car the DeVilles used to cruise through their hometown — a 2019 Toyota Sequoia SUV — comes in part from industry money, as Lisa DeVille's mother receives large royalty payments from production on the land she owns, wealth she uses to help support her family.

Besides royalties, residents also receive disbursement checks cut from the oil and gas money the tribal government collects. Some 16,500 members received $3,000 each last year.

But these benefits often have serious costs. Funding for an early-childhood learning center came from a $1 million donation made by a pipeline company, Crestwood, after it was blamed for spilling more than 1 million gallons of fracking wastewater. The spill reached the lake that supplies the reservation’s drinking water.

“I am not against oil and gas — my family benefits too,” Lisa DeVille said. “I just want the industry to be held accountable for impacts they are causing here. What are you going to tell your children’s children: ‘I am sorry I took the money, and so now you don’t have clean air and clean land and clean water to live?’ ”

The intensity of the flaring — which has surged on Fort Berthold since 2016 — is on display across the reservation, where flares burn with so much power that they sound almost like jet engines. In warmer months, wheat fields need to be sprayed with water so the intense heat does not light them on fire.

A larger share of gas is flared in Fort Berthold than almost anywhere else in the United States. There is a severe shortage of pipelines and processing plants in the area, driving the need to burn. But it is more than just a matter of flames licking the sky.

The Denver-based team from the EPA that visited in June came with infrared cameras, air monitors and a GPS tool that tracked toxic chemical releases. Its findings demonstrated that flaring, which can be unhealthy on its own, was often just a hint of even more harmful gas leaks. Venting can release a variety of pollutants into the air, including volatile organic compounds like ethylbenzene, a possible carcinogen, and toluene, a neurotoxin that may result in birth defects. The compounds also are a factor in the formation of ozone, which can lead to asthma and heart attacks.

The Polluted Air

Companies are required to notify the Interior Department when they are flaring methane beyond the startup of a well. In 2005, the agency received only 50 applications for extended flaring. By 2014, the number had jumped to 1,250. The Interior Department did not respond when asked how many wells on federal and Indian lands flared in 2018.

As part of a broad strategy to slow climate change and also reduce wasteful burning of natural gas that if captured could be sold, the Obama administration adopted a rule in 2016 that put legal limits on the amount of flaring and leaking. The caps would have gotten tighter each year until 2026, when 98 percent of all gas produced on federal lands and Indian reservations was to be captured.

About 70 percent of the gas produced each month on the reservation is captured, according to the state, while the remainder is burned, leaked or intentionally vented. That means operators on Fort Berthold would probably have been targeted for enforcement if the rule had remained in effect.

The rule also required companies to perform semiannual inspections of their equipment on Indian reservations and federal lands to ensure there were no leaks, and to repair any within 30 days.

Moreover, it forced companies to get ahead of the leaks by replacing high-bleed pneumatic controllers, designed to release pressure by letting gas leak, with low-bleed devices.

The EPA estimated that the rule would reduce venting and leaks by 35 percent and flaring by 49 percent within a decade — while also saving enough natural gas nationwide to supply about 740,000 homes a year.

But it was only a matter of days after this rule was finalized that the campaign to kill it began. North Dakota joined with an oil and gas trade group and other states to sue the Interior Department, claiming the federal government was overstepping its authority and creating unnecessary regulations given state limits on flaring.

The Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, a conservative advocacy group affiliated with Charles G. and David H. Koch, followed up by asking Congress to scrap the rule, an effort that fell short by two votes when Sen. John McCain of Arizona and two other Republicans opposed the repeal.

“Improving the control of methane emissions is an important public health and air quality issue,” McCain said, explaining his decision.

Once in power, the Trump administration moved on its own to postpone the rule, an act that a federal judge blocked after noting that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke had “entirely failed to consider the benefits of the rule, such as decreased resource waste, air pollution and enhanced public revenues.”

Undeterred, the Interior Department moved again to remove most of the important provisions, a process it completed in September. Yet even then, the Trump administration, in formal rule-making documents, acknowledged that its actions would come with considerable costs.

Most notably, it estimated that an extra 299 billion cubic feet of natural gas would now be vented or flared over the next decade, a chunk of it at Fort Berthold.

A Tide of Change

The story of oil and gas at Fort Berthold, in a way, is the story of a long-delayed payback for injustices experienced by the three affiliated tribes that call Fort Berthold their home.

Their ancestors controlled vast swaths of the West. But they were assembled here on this North Dakotan land by the U.S. government in the 1870s, an area that a tribal history described as being known for its “unproductive soil, unfriendly climate, scant supply of wood, poor water, high winds, dust, drought, frost, flood, grasshoppers.”

The plight grew even more extreme by the 1950s when the U.S. government built a dam on the Missouri River, which splits Fort Berthold in two. The project flooded the center of the reservation and its most fertile lands, forcing most of the residents to relocate.

But there was a secret lurking here deep underground — a formation of oil and gas called the Bakken. When new drilling technologies emerged about a decade ago, they transformed Fort Berthold into one of the hottest spots in the world for energy production.

“Without choice, we were stuck here by the government,” said Hood, director of the MHA Nation’s Energy Division. “Lo and behold, we were put on top of one of the richest natural resources in North America. We end up being in a very lucrative position.”

This explains, in part, why some tribal leaders are pleased that the Trump administration has repealed most of the Obama Administration’s gas rule. The Interior Department is now telling the MHA Nation that it will be allowed to decide on its own how it wants to regulate methane flaring and venting.

But Hood said that some kind of action was needed.

“I got some flaring going on over here, and I got some flaring going on over there that you can’t see at the moment,” said, pointing in just about every direction visible from his office window.

“It is really a big concern for us as a nation,” he said, “having to breath this methane, benzene, all those dangerous elements that are in the natural gas itself. I really want to do the best that I can to protect the air for our people.”

Hood’s solution, as well as that of chairman of the tribe, Mark N. Fox, is to encourage the construction of pipelines and processing plants near or on the reservation to capture and ship out the gas — a process that could take years, and hit a wall if oil prices fall.

The tribes, Hood said, have also focused on trying to curb venting, the most harmful way to dispose of the unwanted gas, by sending a compliance officer to oil and gas sites with an infrared camera that can detect the emissions. But when pressed to detail how that effort was proceeding — and how much in fines his office had imposed for the widespread violations — Hood said he would not discuss the matter.

Back in Washington, the Trump-era EPA is now moving to weaken its own rule limiting harmful methane gas releases on new well sites.

“We are sort of powerless — this is our reality,” said DeVille as he and his wife completed their drive though the most intense Fort Berthold flaring zones. “This is our reality now.”

A Regulation Undone: Natural Gas Flaring

THE REGULATION: After years of debate, the Interior Department in late 2016 put new limits on the flaring of natural gas produced on federal or Indian lands. When the gas is burned, it is wasted, and when it is burned improperly, it can cause respiratory problems.

The leaking of that gas is also harmful, and is a major contributor to climate change. The chemicals are in some cases carcinogens, while air pollution associated with the releases can lead to asthma and even heart attacks.

Starting in 2018, producers were required under the rule to capture 85 percent of the gas, with that number jumping to 98 percent by 2026. The Interior Department estimated that this would save 41 billion cubic feet of gas a year — enough to supply about 740,000 households.

THE ROLLBACK: In September 2018, after complaints from the oil and gas industry, the department reversed the flaring limits, arguing that state governments and Indian tribes could impose their own.

THE CONSEQUENCES: The Trump administration acknowledged that 299 billion cubic feet of gas would be lost, through venting or flaring, over the coming decade as a result of the changes.

71 percent: The portion of gas produced in the Bakken area of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota that is captured, according to a November tally by the state. The other 29 percent either leaks or is vented or flared — a rate far above what the now-revoked Interior Department rule would have allowed.

3 billion: The amount of gas, in cubic feet, that these flares may be burning off or releasing each month — a volume that could heat about 600,000 households. Oil production at Fort Berthold has jumped by 75 percent in the past two years. Gas production has surged, too, and energy companies are limited in their capacity to channel the gas into pipelines.

1,250: The number of applications the Interior Department received in 2014 for the extended flaring of methane. In 2005, the agency received only 50 applications.

$330 million: The budget of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation’s government, up from $20 million only 15 years ago. Ninety percent of the budget comes from energy-related sources.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/us/politics/north-dakota-gas-flaring-environment.html" id="d7d21b11-1926-3964-a7a6-8133fb190149">The New York Times</a>.

FORT BERTHOLD, N.D. — In late June, a specially equipped truck from the Environmental Protection Agency drove through the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation to examine air hazards. What it found was sobering.

On a North Dakota Indian Reservation, Oil Riches Come at a Cost

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Pulse Kenya is the most followed news and entertainment platform in Kenya. It informs and engages young Kenyans around the clock and provides updates by the hour.

Eric Lipton

Articles written by the author

Citing a 'War on Coal' in Texas, Trump Wages a Counterassault

On a North Dakota Indian Reservation, Oil Riches Come at a Cost