In Booming Oil Field, Natural Gas Can Be Free | Hacker News Reader

In Booming Oil Field, Natural Gas Can Be Free

wsj.com

41 pointsprostoalex17 comments

Enough flaring that the fields show up at night via satellite, rivaling some cities:

https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/01/16/169511949/a...

One of the more interesting crypto mining ideas I've been exposed to (and it's been quite a few...) is co-locating shipping containers with natural gas generators plus compute at oil fields flaring off natural gas.

The idea was the companies would potentially even pay you for taking it, since most states(?) will charge you some nominal "environmental" fee for flaring it.

I have no idea if anyone actually went through with the idea, but it certainly was discussed quite a bit a couple years ago.

It's an exceedingly interesting use case. Effectively free raw energy, but almost no proper connectivity. Very few use cases for such a situation, but even a 3G modem is fine for mining. I'm not certain what other uses one could come up with for on-site use of this energy...

Would this be the same flaring off that one sees on Oil Rigs? -- I wonder if @RDL would be inclined to speak on the idea of floating a data-barge comprised of the sea-based-data-tubes that Gates has been funding (Project Natik)

https://gizmodo.com/microsofts-newest-data-center-is-a-giant...

Anecdote alert: based on conversations I've had with workers on location, there's plenty of energy being generated -- the heat from flaring wells can be felt hundreds of yards away.

A guy a went to trade school with, two decades ago, used to tells stories of drilling for oil in South Australia and finding nat gas, more nat gas, and nat gas again.

They’d just cap the well and move on.

This situation will not last forever because new chemical plants and pipelines will be built. Typically the natural gas is processed into things like plastic pellets that are then shipped to China for assembly into goods to be shipped back. It is easy to see why reducing fossil fuel use is so hard when it acts like the juice of life for economies near the places that have it.

Not true. Flaring of natural gas will happen until it’s prohibited, as it has since the inception of the industry. Building pipelines and chemical plants is not viable in most of the cases where gas is flared.

The article is focusing on trading gas at low prices, which means that the transportation infrastructure is there, to get it to a useful place (otherwise it wouldn't be low-price gas, it would be unsold gas). Gas is flared when it can't be sold, but in this case we see gas being sold at extraordinarily low prices.

New ethylene plants are being built in the US gulf coast area. Here are some links:

https://news.exxonmobil.com/press-release/exxonmobil-starts-... http://analysis.petchem-update.com/supply-chain-logistics/in... http://analysis.petchem-update.com/supply-chain-logistics/us...

New pipelines are presently being constructed:

https://napipelines.com/oil-pipeline-report-new-administrati...

The coming increase in gas prices off the absolute bedrock level they are at now cannot be priced in to present-day gas prices because gas is so hard to store. However, it is probably already priced in to oil company shares, so even though this information is true I doubt there is any money left to be made off of it.

I'm pretty sure it's a safety issue. You can flare the natural gas, or you can collect it, if it's economic to do so, but you can't just let it accumulate in the general vicinity. Boom.

Not only that, but poisonous gases (mainly H2S) are also present in natural gas, which can kill you in concentrations as low as 100 ppm, which, in percentage terms, is 0.01%. This gas is heavier than air, so it also tends to concentrate in low lying areas.

https://outline.com/4ZTV5c

Given the excess pipeline capacity to Mexico from the article I'm guessing building a chemical plant in Mexico would be good thing, except it probably takes 3 - 5 years before you can bring a plant online and who knows what gas prices or demand will be like 5 years from now.

Disclaimer - couldn't read more than an introductory two paragraphs - this may be addressed in text.

I wonder why they don't just start stockpiling liquefied natural gas and wait for the value to eventually rise. Even if prices don't rise sufficiently to sell it could potentially be vertically integrated to substitute for burning coal for input heat in oil refineries. Perhaps it is related to the liquification process costs plus storage.

I wonder if it would be because storing/creating liguified natural gas in large quantities requires an incredibly complex, expensive system to do so? (I am speculating on the economic of this based on this guy:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/transport/1...

One big problem is that the production usually starts at a high rate, then declines quite rapidly - say 20-50% per year - for the remainder of the field life.

If you design for the peak rate, the plant will be expensive and underutilized. If you design for a lower rate, the plant will economically insignificant and you still have to flare a lot of the gas initially.

Ah so even if they could make some sort of mobile liquifier (no guarantees of something sufficently big like that being energy efficient net let alone financially a good investment) it would be a logistical pain.

"The resulting greenhouse-gas emissions are equivalent to the daily exhaust emitted by about 2.7 million cars"

why i find those seriously concerned about carbon footprint from eating meat a bit strange..

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