Lynn Helms, head of oil and gas regulation, says job was about making a positive impact on North Dakota lives – InForum

BISMARCK — For more than a quarter of a century, Lynn Helms has led the agency that regulates one of North Dakota’s top industries: oil and natural gas exploration.

After 26 years working for the state, the North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources director has retired. His last day was June 30.

Helms led the department through an oil boom that made North Dakota one of the top oil-producing states in the US, a price crash that left thousands of energy workers without jobs and the coronavirus pandemic. He was known for creating regulations that inspired policies in other states.

In an interview with The Forum, Helms said the job wasn’t about money or fame. What was most important to him was working with his team and knowing he made a positive impact on North Dakotans, he said.

“I would say that this job offers the opportunity to make a difference in the life of every North Dakotan,” he said. “That is the most gratifying thing there is in life.”

Helms said he came to North Dakota in 1980 to work in Williston as a production engineer for Amerada Hess Corp., now known as Hess Corp. At the time, North Dakota was in the middle of an oil boom that ended in the mid-1980s.

He said he had a good career with Hess. In the 1990s, he faced a choice when a team project he headed ended in North Dakota: move to Houston or find other employment.

He said he loved North Dakota and wanted to stay. His predecessor at the North Dakota Oil and Gas Division, Wesley Norton, retired, and Helms became the director of the government entity in July 1998.

“It was just an amazing opportunity,” Helms said.

In 2005, North Dakota rebranded its Oil and Gas Division as the North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources. That’s around the same time they started to watch how oil companies began drilling for oil in the Bakken area of ​​Montana.

Most people didn’t realize how big the next oil boom would be and how far it would expand into North Dakota, Helms said. He and a handful of other North Dakota regulators began to prepare.

“Four or five people on the planet believed that the North Dakota Bakken was going to be a really big deal,” he said.

At its height, the Bakken boom in North Dakota had 218 rigs exploring for oil in May 2012, according to the Department of Mineral Resources. That’s compared to 37 rigs in May this year.

The most oil produced in a day during the boom was 1.2 million barrels, or 50.4 million gallons, the Department of Mineral Resources said.

By 2012, North Dakota climbed to become the second top producer of oil, behind only Texas. The two states, by 2014, produced almost half of the country’s oil, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

North Dakota’s population exploded during the oil boom, going from under 658,000 residents in 2008 to nearly 739,000 in 2014, a 12% jump in six years.

“I’m pretty proud of the fact that our state went from a place where the population got smaller and older every census to a place where the population gets larger and younger,” he said. “That’s all because of the energy boom.”

As head of the Department of Mineral Resources, Helms wrote policies to regulate oil and natural gas production.

“There are companies that probably don’t need a lot of regulation. “They always want to do the right thing,” he said. “But there are also a lot of private investors and oil and gas operators that only do the right thing if they are made to get in line.”

He noted challenges, such as water supply for hydraulic fracturing. Also known as fracking, the drilling method injects large amounts of water, sand, and chemicals deep into the ground to fracture rock and allow oil to flow to the surface through drilling rigs.

The method faced criticism due to the possibility of the chemicals used in fracking tainting underground water supplies, particularly in Pennsylvania, he noted.

“We had to work really hard to help the public understand how we were doing it differently, how our geology was different and how our practices were different,” he said.

Flaring, or the burning of gas that comes off wells, also became a concern. During the boom, the industry flared up to 36% of its natural gas.

Helms helped develop regulations to reduce the amount of flaring and force companies to adopt gas capture plans.

“That was an area where we really had to strongly disagree with the industry and take a stand that there were limits to how rapidly we could let them grow oil production,” he said.

Other states have adopted similar policies because North Dakota took the initiative, he said. The state now captures 95% of its natural gas and flares the rest.

“It happened first here,” he said.

Oil and production water spills became a frequent problem during the oil boom. The 2013 Tesoro pipeline spill near Tioga became one of the largest in US history when 840,000 gallons leaked into the ground.

The cleanup took five years and cost roughly $100 million, according to media reports.

From 2014 into 2015, a pipeline released 70,000 barrels, or nearly 3 million gallons, of produced water — or brine — north of Williston. Believed to be the largest inland spill in US history, it resulted in $36 million in criminal fines and civil penalties for Summit Midstream, the company that owned the pipeline.

Those spills were “crisis-level incidents,” Helms said. Regulators discovered pipelines constructed between 2009 and 2012 didn’t have independent supervisors and were built poorly, he said. People operating the pipelines were not sharing data, meaning leaks could go on for days, he said.

North Dakota has become a national leader when it comes to oil and gas regulation, Helms said. Other states look to North Dakota when looking at carbon storage, hydraulic fracturing, gas capture and databases for sharing information, he said.

Helms created a public information officer position to handle media requests as the boom roared. He also gave “director’s cuts,” or monthly press conferences via live stream, about oil and gas production.

“That’s one of the best decisions I ever made because you have to have somebody focused on that,” he said. “The energy industries have such a huge impact on North Dakota citizens that you just have to be talking to them all the time.”

Alison Ritter was Helms’ first spokesperson and worked with the Department of Mineral Resources from 2011 to 2018. She recalled multiple requests for interviews with Helms and information from the department during the boom.

Helms wanted to understand the impact oil production would have on residents, Ritter said.

“He did want to tell North Dakota’s story,” she said.

Ritter called her time working with Helms “one of the best times of my career.” Helms took the time to listen and understand people, and he worked with people to make sure any job they did was done right, she said.

“Lynn is a very special man,” she said. “He has an unbelievable ability to take a very complicated matter and break it down in a way for people to understand.”

Helms is an “extremely brilliant man,” North Dakota Petroleum Council President Ron Ness said. Helms used science to develop proper regulations without impeding oil production, and companies rarely challenged him, Ness said.

“The reality is we have tough regulations in North Dakota, but they are smart ones,” he said.

Helms said it is easy to kill an idea before it gets started. Still, he tried to keep regulation separate from promotion, he said.

“I always told Ron (Ness) that it was his job to promote the industry,” Helms said. “It was my job to promote producing the resource, the oil, and to regulate how his industry did that.”