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TransCanada received permission from federal regulators to re-start the Keystone Pipeline a week after a 168,000-gallon spill in South Dakota. The pipeline started back up on Sunday morning at a reduced operating pressure. The incident has given ammunition to a group appealing the decision by the South Dakota Public Utility Commission (PUC) to re-certify TransCanada’s permit to build the Keystone XL Pipeline, despite President Obama’s denial of a permit needed to cross international borders.

As the collapse of oil prices threatens North Dakota's shale drilling rush, state regulators are considering a move they say could save the oil industry millions of dollars: weakening the state's laws on disposing of radioactive waste.

Burlington Northern Santa Fe recently said it would proceed with plans to increase speeds for oil-by-rail unit trains in Devil’s Lake, North Dakota, to 60 MPH from 30 MPH, despite opposition from local officials. The announcement came merely a week after the Obama Administration announced its proposed regulations for trains carrying oil obtained via fracking from the state's Bakken Shale basin.

North Dakota's sole abortion clinic has settled a lawsuit it filed over a new law requiring doctors who perform abortions to obtain hospital-admitting privileges, officials said Friday. Wayne Stenehjem, the state attorney general, and an attorney for the New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights, which assisted the Red River Women's Clinic in its lawsuit, told The Associated Press that the settlement was reached late Thursday and sent to Judge Wickham Corwin for approval Friday.

According to testimony in front of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee, 36 percent of the gas by-product from oil obtained via fracking in North Dakota's Bakken Shale basin was flared off as waste during a brutally cold midwest winter with no end in sight. The reason for this unnecessary waste? Profits.

On December 20, both chambers of the U.S. Congress passed a little-noticed bill to expedite permitting for hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") on public lands in the Bakken Shale basin, located predominantly in North Dakota. And on December 26, President Obama signed the bill into law. Days later, on December 30, a Burlington Northern Santa Fe freight train owned by Warren Buffett carrying Bakken-fracked oil exploded in Casselton, North Dakota.

Warren Buffett bought more shares in a major pipeline company December 30th – the same day as a train derailed and exploded in Casselton, North Dakota. In the rush to move oil to sate our unquenchable demand, more accidents like this will happen. And the environment and workers will suffer.

North Dakota, the nation's No. 2 oil producer behind Texas, recorded nearly 300 oil pipeline spills in less than two years, state documents show. None was reported to the public, officials said. The pipeline spills — many of them small — are among some 750 "oil field incidents" that have occurred since January 2012 without public notification.

A 2011 North Dakota law that outlaws one of two drugs used in nonsurgical abortions violates the state and U.S. constitutions, a state judge ruled Monday.

"No compelling state interest justifies this infringement ..." Corwin wrote in his 58-page ruling. He already had granted an injunction preventing the law from taking effect.

North Dakota's governor positioned the oil-rich state Tuesday as a primary battleground in the decades-old fight over abortion rights, signing into law the nation's toughest restriction on the procedure and urging lawmakers to set aside cash for an inevitable legal challenge.

Minutes after Republican Gov. Jack Dalrymple signed three anti-abortion measures — one banning them when a heartbeat can be detected, which is as early as six weeks into a pregnancy — unsolicited donations began pouring into the state's lone abortion clinic to help opponents prove the new laws are unconstitutional.