There is a leak from a wellhead near Tioga, North Dakota. And much is being learned about "fracking confidential".
http://thinkprogress.org/...
An oil well near Tioga, ND hasn’t stopped leaking oil since local emergency officials were notified of the spill on Friday. But because the well is under a confidentiality agreement that makes some of the well’s information a secret, details such as the spill’s aren’t being released to the public. Alison Ritter, spokesperson for the North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources, told ThinkProgress that because of the well’s confidentiality, only a few things about the well could be released to the public: the well’s operator, name, file and identification number, location (in coordinates), and the date that the company’s confidentiality agreement lifts...Ritter said confidential wells are common in North Dakota — 18 percent of the state’s oil and gas wells are confidential, and her agency publishes a list of them on its website. She said most well operators in the state apply for confidentiality status for their wells at the time of permitting to protect information on production and other “proprietary” data.
Because we can...
...Jack Ekstrom, Whiting Petroleum’s vice president of government affairs, explained the desire for well owners to seek confidentiality status to the blog “the Barrel” in 2012:
“If you have a significant completion, and there is acreage available, you don’t want that particular completion to be made public until you have leased as much acreage as you possibly can around it,” he said.
He also had a simpler reason, though — “because we can.” In North Dakota, as the Barrel article points out (and Ritter confirmed), all requests for confidentiality are approved without any requirements for well operators to justify why they should be granted confidentiality...
North Dakota is in the midst of a boom, for better (for some) or for worse (for others). A complacent public hungry for jobs may favor being light on regulations and choose to live with consequences. The rest of the story is yet to be told.