Lights Out in the Bakken: A Review and Analysis of Flaring Regulation and Its Potential Effects on North Dakota Shale Oil Production
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Years ago, there was only darkness on the North Dakota plains.Bismarck, Minot, and Dickinson appeared as small, bright lights to the west and south, bordered by a smattering of Canadian towns to the north.But over a decade later, images from space captured a brilliant area of light in the Williston Basin, glowing brighter than the bustling cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul in neighboring Minnesota.This area of light was not a city, but rather the Bakken shale slay (the "Bakken"), alit by hundreds of drilling rigs and natural gas flares. 2 The prolific escalation of activity in the Bakken is due to the relatively recent technological combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, coupled with high commodity prices.This requisite combination of technology and price permits economic hydrocarbon production of shale reservoirs.The resulting ramp up in shale production has propelled the United States to the top position as the world's largest producer of oil and natural gas.3 But with this increase in production is a corresponding increase in environmental concerns.Foremost among these concerns is the rise in greenhouse gas ("GHG") and volatile organic compound ("VOC") emissions.Unlike concerns over water contamination or seismic activity by hydraulic fracturing or wastewater injection, which are still mired in controversy and undergoing scientific "Ferg" James, Turner Valley, in IN THE LIGHT OF
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".