Originally published for customers February 4, 2026.
What’s the issue?
Intensity Infrastructure Partners advanced its North Dakota pipeline with firm transportation commitments, moving Phase I toward a targeted 2029 in-service date.
Why does it matter?
Confirming emerging demand helps validate gas-to-power markets and assess whether a region like North Dakota can support additional pipeline and generation infrastructure.
What’s our view?
North Dakota’s west-to-east pipeline buildout initially appeared uncertain enough to require state underwriting. Intensity’s advance suggests demand stabilizing enough to support multiple pipelines.
Intensity Infrastructure Partners’ advanced its North Dakota pipeline with firm transportation commitments, moving Phase I toward a targeted 2029 in-service date. Confirming emerging demand helps validate gas-to-power markets and assess whether a region like North Dakota can support additional pipeline and generation infrastructure. North Dakota’s west-to-east pipeline buildout initially appeared uncertain enough to require state underwriting. Intensity’s advance suggests demand stabilizing enough to support multiple pipelines.
As shown below, Phase I of Intensity’s North Dakota pipeline will boost gas supply at multiple receipt points on the Northern Border and WBI Energy Transmission pipelines. Also shown are the thermal power plants that will be within 25 miles of Intensity’s pipeline, including Rainbow Energy Center’s Coal Creek Station, which will be supported by the pipeline.
In Field of Dreams, the story begins with a single signal: a voice that makes no immediate economic sense but refuses to go away. North Dakota has had its own version of that voice for years. When associated gas has nowhere to go, it doesn’t disappear. It gets burned. Persistent flaring has been the clearest signal that supply has outpaced infrastructure and local demand.
Indeed, gas vented and flared in North Dakota accounted for a fifth of the total in the U.S. in 2024.
In The Good, the Badlands, and the Intensity, our analysis focused on movement rather than waste, how gas needed to move east across the state as gas-fired generation, data centers, and industrial demand began to take shape. The signal was already there and two pipelines — Intensity and WBI’s Bakken East — were both looking to serve it, and North Dakota was looking to assist by helping to underwrite some of the investment risk.
In Western Test Cases: Bakken East and the Critical Energy Reliability Link, North Dakota stepped in as a shipper on Bakken East. At the time, it was unclear whether the market could support even one new pipeline, let alone two. The state chose a single vehicle through which to underwrite that uncertainty, with the intent to release capacity to other shippers as demand materialized. In short, North Dakota was helping feed an emerging market by investing ahead of certain and visible demand, betting that the market would respond.
That is where the Field of Dreams metaphor fits. Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) builds the baseball field without knowing whether anyone will come. The first arrival, the ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson, isn’t the crowd or even the rest of the team, he’s proof that the thing can exist at all. That is the right way to understand North Dakota’s role in Bakken East: early proof of concept.
North Dakota’s underlying signal — flaring — has been there for a long time because oil and gas production has long outpaced consumption.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, North Dakota vented and flared approximately 67,700 MMcf in 2024, broadly consistent with recent years, even as national flaring rose again in 2023 and 2024, driven primarily by Texas, North Dakota and Wyoming.
Venting is also banned in North Dakota, and when gas lacks an economic outlet, these rules push it towards capture. But the rules alone don’t create demand, infrastructure does. If more durable in-state demand materializes, expanded gas infrastructure should reduce flaring at the margin by giving associated gas a more consistent outlet.
Back to our Field of Dreams analogy, the payoff really came when the cars started to line up at the end of the road, shifting the story from whether the field can exist to how much demand it can sustain. If North Dakota’s decision to step in on Bakken East was the early proof of concept, Intensity’s announcement is the first few cars on the road. Their partnership with Rainbow Energy Center confirmed that executed precedent agreements are sufficient to advance Phase I of Intensity’s intrastate pipeline. The 36-inch system is designed for roughly 1.1 Bcf/d, and retains uncommitted capacity to support incremental gas-fired generation.
More important than the specifications is what the commitments represent. Intensity is advancing without state underwriting, on a separate commercial and regulatory track from Bakken East. And while the Bakken sits in western North Dakota, the cornfields are in the east, right where this infrastructure is headed. Maybe community outreach will also result in a new baseball field somewhere.
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