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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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