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Comment by dsfyu404ed | Hacker News Reader

And on the other side of that coin there is god knows how much residential and industrial diesel usage that could instead be nat-gas but isn't because no pipelines so it just gets wasted by flaring it at the well (which is downright terrible for the environment).

The perfect is the enemy of the "good enough for the next 5yr".

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> it just gets wasted by flaring it at the well

There's actually some companies that are making use of this "waste"! For example, you can take geo-agnostic computation (like crypto mining) with small bandwidth requirements and move it to literally be on-site. Then you power it with generators that are fed the natural gas instead of flaring it.

This can partially displace computation that otherwise would have used up higher-cost energy.

See [0] for the best example of this that I'm aware of. Section titled "How Bitcoin Uses Otherwise-Wasted Energy".

[0] https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/

I would argue that this specific use-case is still energy wasted all the same. Maybe it is even net negative given that it increases the difficulty for other energy wasting miners, even before considering other externalities.

New gas connections aren't permitted in some municipalities, and many areas only have 30% to 40% uptake rates for Natural Gas. The best days for Natural Gas are behind it imo.

Regardless, it's borderline criminal that they just waste it due to lack of transportation infrastructure when those BTUs could have done useful work and the demand must instead be made up with potentially dirtier fuels.

IMO, natural gas lines to homes are no longer a necessity. Better overall efficiency can be achieved by burning the gas at a power plant, sending electricity to the home, and using a heat pump to heat the home.

Similarly, induction stove tops are more efficient than cooking with gas and have other benefits such as being easier to clean.

We could do better in a few circumstances, but the idea of piping natural gas from the remote places where a lot of NA oil is produced often doesn't make economic sense and it is literally impossible to get a pipeline built in the US and Canada. This means eastern consumers import tankers of oil from nice places like Saudi and we ship even more by rail at terrible costs and environmental risk.

It's only literally impossible because of politics. It's not a technology limitation.

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