Every day, large volumes of associated gas are created around the world, mostly because there is not enough infrastructure to transport the gas to market. This is not only a colossal waste of energy: toast generates a lot of carbon dioxide (CO2) and, according to a recent study, is only 91% efficient (on average) at removing methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas (GHG). But what if there was a cost-effective way to beneficially consume the gas that’s stuck in remote parts of the Permian, Bakken and other major producing areas? Turns out there is: using on-site gas to produce electricity to power portable and modular data centers used to support cryptocurrency mining, artificial intelligence (AI) programs like ChatGPT, and other high-tech endeavors which require massive amounts of computing power and energy. . In today’s RBN blog, we discuss the growing use of stranded natural gas as a power source for data centers out of nowhere.
Crude oil-focused producers have been gassing in the US since the first oil was produced in western Pennsylvania more than 160 years ago. Back in the day, the flame seemed to make a lot of sense. (At the time, nobody really thought about the environmental consequences.) After all, there was no infrastructure to transport and process the associated volatile gas that came up from the oil wells: the controlled burning of the gas in situ did that oil production was very important. safer Over time, if wells in a production area not far from civilization produced large volumes of associated gas, it made economic sense to develop gas gathering systems and larger diameter pipelines to deliver the gas to market. Even so, gas roasting continued, but to a somewhat lesser degree, for both safety and economic reasons: sometimes the volumes of gas produced were too small to justify the cost of developing the processing infrastructure and takeaway and sometimes the collection and takeaway projects faced delays in securing rights of way or permits. During the Shale era, large amounts of gas were flared in some areas (especially in the Bakken, but also elsewhere) as producers and midstreamers struggled to keep up with infrastructure needs. In 2011 and again in 2014, more than a third of the gas produced in North Dakota was flared, prompting the state to implement regulations that led to a steady decline in flared volumes to where found today in less than 5%.
[Flaring is an even more serious issue globally. The World Bank said in a March report that an astounding 139 billion cubic meters (4.9 trillion cubic feet, or 13.4 Bcf/d) of natural gas was flared by the global oil and gas industry in 2022 — enough to power all of sub-Saharan Africa. This flaring released an estimated 357 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent (MMtCO2e), 315 MMtCO2e of it in the form of CO2 and 42 MMtCO2e in the form of methane.]
