Liam Denning, Columnist

Flaring Gas Is Cheap for This Fracker, But Not for Us

A North Dakota gas producer is wasting natural assets and financial assets creditors aim to recover.

June 30, 2021 at 12:30 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

Kind of a waste.
Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images North America

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Hurtful as it may be to hear this, regulations exist because we don’t always want to do the right thing. If we were actually the paragons of society our parents insist we are, regulations wouldn’t be needed.

With this in mind, consider the case of Nine Point Energy LLC, a small, privately held oil and gas producer operating in North Dakota that entered chapter 11 in March. It has an exit plan lined up whereby lenders including AllianceBernstein Holding LP and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., who are also providing debtor-in-possession finance, would take ownership to forgive about $250 million of debt.