> 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".