The distance to ship propane to markets is much shorter as thousands of NGL Processing plants are located in oil fields or close by when a number of pipelines tie into each other from various relatively close fields. Many Bakken Basin oil companies in North Dakota, Montana, Manitoba and Saskatchewan gas fields separate the NGL's in the field,allowing the drillers to sell propane directly to small wholesalers, eliminating the large refinery control of product and prices for propane or butane. One oil company operating in the Bakken in ND, stated two weeks ago, that the estimate of 577 billion barrels of oil-gas in the Bakken,should be upgraded to 903 billion barrels.