“I’m Mike Wilson, and I live in Bainville, Montana. I’m a rancher. My parents ranched on our place before me, and my grandparents and great-grandparents before them. We’ve got… how many? 22, 23 wells on our place? And we own some of the mineral rights, but a lot of them belong to the BLM and the state. Honest to God, I can’t keep track. It’s just a mess. You can go on the state website and find maps for land ownership. But the minerals are impossible. They’re all divided up a thousand times.”
“The first company to drill on our ranch was called Zenergy. Zenergy’s policy was, they wouldn’t turn a well on until they had a gas line hooked up to it. So it took ’em a while to build that stuff in, and be able to get the wells going. But then, a different company bought Zenergy, or their Montana holdings. And what was odd about that was…well, the new company would drill a well, and there’d already be a gas line very close to it, from when Zenergy was running the show, but the new company would say, ‘Well, we use a different company to market our gas, so we’re not going to use that line.’ So they’d flare it off, until the new line was built. Eventually, we ended up with double pipelines all over the place. Just…real odd. It took the infrastructure of two companies to solve the one thing.”
“I’ve seen enough natural gas wasted to have heated my home forever. You could have heated my home until the end of time with the gas they’ve flared off. It just makes no sense.”
“The other day, one of the wells on our place had a pit fire. Something was wrong with the treater, I suppose. Instead of separating the oil and gas and water, the treater was dumping the oil and the water, or one of the two, into the gas line. It happens throughout the oil patch…it just happens a lot. So, anyways, we spotted it during the day, when I was chasing down a cow. You could see black smoke, a whole lot of it, from real far away. And I went over there, and the pumper was getting it fixed, so, you know. I didn’t worry. But then that night– well, it was worse. There was a huge fire.”