natural gas flaring
By: Jacob Orledge
WATFORD CITY, N.D. (North Dakota Monitor) – Natural gas is going to be the “savior” of the power grid.
That was the message from David Coker, chief executive officer of One Power Solutions, during the North Dakota Petroleum Council’s annual meeting Thursday.
“People are starting to realize it now. We have a power problem in this nation,” Coker said. “Natural gas is the solution to our power problem.”
That’s good news for North Dakota, which produces more than 3.4 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day.
Meanwhile, the demand for artificial intelligence is growing so rapidly that the power generation needed is expected to reach 50 gigawatts by 2028, according to Todd Slawson, chair of the North Dakota Petroleum Foundation.
“Fifty gigawatts is like building another California,” Slawson said.
Nick Phillips, vice president of Applied Digital, the company behind the Harwood and Ellendale data centers, said North Dakota is a prime location for future data center development in many ways. The access to power generation and lower cooling costs are big factors. Phillips expects more companies to begin developing the facilities in North Dakota in the near future.
“It’s still early,” Phillips said. “We’re really on the leading edge of this.”
Applied Digital’s two data center projects are on the eastern edge of the state, despite western North Dakota being the source of natural gas for power generation. Phillips said being closer to population centers can be a benefit in terms of workforce, but he said it’s plausible for future data center development to occur in other parts of the state.
But one potential road block to rapid construction of data centers in the western half of the state, beyond workforce shortages, is power generation.
“We have plans for every electron we can make,” Gavin McCollam, vice president of Basin Electric Power Cooperative, said. “We don’t have a lot of spare generation.”
Basin Electric just completed work on Phase IV of the Pioneer Generation Station near Williston, adding 600 megawatts to its generation capacity, and on the same day broke ground on the Bison Generation Power Station. The latter, McCollam said, will be the largest in the state. Both are fueled by natural gas.
Neither is being built to supply data centers and artificial intelligence. The power generation is needed to supply Basin Electric’s existing consumer base.
Basin Electric has had 10 formal requests for sites needing a large amount of power through the cooperative’s Large Load Program, an initiative launched earlier this year with the goal “to insulate our members from the cost of adding generation for data.”
Those 10 requests, McCollam said, add up to 5,000 megawatts. “It’s almost double our existing generation capabilities,” he said. “There’s certainly a disconnect there that needs to be managed very carefully. It reminds me a little bit of the oil and gas boom.”
Rainbow Energy, the owner of the coal-fired Coal Creek Station power plant in central North Dakota, is already providing the energy for one data center and is making plans to power more. Jeff Jonson, president of the company, said Rainbow Energy will have 415 megawatts of spare generation available for artificial intelligence by mid-2026, with additional talks ongoing with potential customers.
He said Rainbow Energy is also planning to add 2,100 megawatts of additional power generation, “an enormous load,” using natural gas shipped east from the Bakken.
Chevron enters the Bakken
The oil industry meeting also featured a representative from Chevron, which recently became a player in North Dakota’s oil field with the acquisition of Hess Corp.
Chevron, one of the largest oil companies in the world, has big plans for the Bakken, a company official told the crowd. Hess’ North Dakota operations will be officially integrated into Chevron Oct. 1.
“There is a lot of commonality between Chevron and Hess and the cultures. Especially when it comes to safety and the environment,” said Kim McHugh, a vice president of a division for Chevron, during a one-on-one conversation with Ron Ness, president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council. “We are in a good starting point together.”
She said one internal goal of Chevron’s is finding a way to double the amount of oil recovered from unconventional assets, such as the Bakken. Finding the key to enhanced oil recovery, she said, is going to make or break that goal.
Ness said he’s excited a company as large as Chevron is about to enter North Dakota’s oil and gas industry.
“I think you interject a whole new group of ideas into the basin,” Ness said.
McHugh said they’ve already observed places in Hess’ operations where there is room for improvement, though it’s still early days yet.
“We’re just getting behind the curtain,” McHugh said. “What I can say is we see opportunity to continue to improve on the performance there.”
Chevron’s vice president emphasized the need for the company to build relationships with landowners and communities.
“You cannot build those relationships when you’re in a bind,” she said. “You’ve got to build them way ahead of that.”
Comments