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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

About about using the $1 Billion in natural gas they burn off every year in North Dakota for electricity instead of just heating the atmosphere.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2269517/The-picture-...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/27/business/energy-environmen...

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I seem to be one of the few persons commenting so far who actually lives in the region and regularly reads local reporting on issues in North Dakota (a state neighboring my state). Western North Dakota, where the Bakken Shale oil boom is occurring, is very sparsely populated and historically had minimal infrastructure. It takes TIME to build pipelines to move the natural gas brought up by oil drilling operations to natural gas customers. Pipeline proposals are currently in regulatory review. There isn't even pipeline infrastructure in place yet for all of the petroleum production in North Dakota--much of the oil produced there is brought to broader markets in tanker trucks, and the truck traffic volumes are putting a lot of stress on highway roadbeds until the highways can be upgraded. Right now there is a boom economy in western North Dakota, with extremely high wages, low unemployment, a shortage of single women,

http://www.twincities.com/national/ci_22382285/north-dakota-...

and established businesses in the region importing workers from as far away as Illinois just to keep up normal operations as workers quit to join oil field crews. There hasn't been time to build infrastructure yet to move away the natural gas to markets that will pay for the gas--especially because the price of natural gas all over the United States has crashed because of the huge increase in production in the last few years. But given time, yes, there will be infrastructure in place to transport Bakken Shale gas to other markets, and I'm sure that we here in Minnesota will be as glad to have North Dakotan natural gas to supplement our nuclear-powered energy grid as we already are to have North Dakotan petroleum brought in by truck. Once more pipelines are built, the entire United States energy economy will become more flexible.

Still to be figured out is the economics of converting natural gas deliquefaction terminals (those cost BILLIONS of dollars and years to build or convert) along the Gulf Coast into liquefaction terminals, so that the United States can get into the business of exporting liquified natural gas. It could happen. North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula used to flare off all of their natural gas incidentally brought up during petroleum production--there was no local market for it. It took a long time to develop natural gas liquefaction; now there is international trade in natural gas that was undreamed of when I was growing up.

I don't get it. If you don't have the capacity to transport what you are producing, you can't be producing. Or put very simply: you can not be allowed to burn off unwanted gas. The cost is certainly not zero, it is an enormous sum that dwarfs whatever profit they could hope to get from selling it, and it is failed states only that would allow this massive negative externality.

There seems to be no learning in the American midwest. Every other time some novel way of destroying the environment comes along, disenfranchised states quickly clear out all regulatory law to make place for the new boom, and when it's over they are left with unemployed single men with a bunch of new trucks and a wrecked environment while the companies made off with the profit.

Burning the gas as waste contributes CO2 to the atmosphere, but burning the gas for productive reasons still produces that same CO2.

If it were burned for productive reasons, some of the thermal energy released would be stored in chemical bonds formed by the manufacturing of any number of things, but most of it would ultimately still be released into the atmosphere as waste heat during some stage of its use.

There is the angle that if more natural gas were used to generate electricity, then less coal burning would be required. That certainly is an argument for getting and burning more natural gas in power plants, but barring that possibility in the present due to poor logistics, we will still be burning that coal whether the natural gas is burned off as waste, or whether it is never pumped up in the first place.

We could also spend money taking the gas and shoving it back where it came from, but that really is not practical.

The bigoted attitude towards the mid-west is uncalled for, even if you don't like what is going on in North Dakota.

  > Burning the gas as waste contributes CO2 to the
  > atmosphere, but burning the gas for productive
  > reasons still produces that same CO2.

True, but if has to be burned, it may as well be productive. Moreover, if it's burned unproductively now, then presumably there is other productive CO2 being released now as well (unless we start accepting black-outs). There could be as much as two units of CO2 being released now, versus a single unit of CO2 otherwise. So that's more CO2 over a short time-scale.

There are time-scales over which releasing CO2 is more or less harmful; I don't pretend to know the critical ones. However, it seems self evident that if that rate of release can be slowed, then its consequences will be less harmful, even if the total amount of CO2 released by T_{infinity} is exactly the same.

> "Moreover, if it's burned unproductively now, then presumably there is other productive CO2 being released now as well (unless we start accepting black-outs). There could be as much as two units of CO2 being released now, versus a single unit of CO2 otherwise. So that's more CO2 over a short time-scale."

I assume that either way, we are going to eventually burn it until depletion. We can't keep it up forever, we will need to switch to renewable energy at some point and that renewable energy will be carbon neutral.

It's a shame that it is being wasted instead of used for something productive, but I am just not convinced that it is some sort of environmental disaster.

I don't think we will run out of gas before we switch to renewables. The supply of gas (as in, the amount of gas that can be produced per month) is limited and the demand for energy is always increasing, so prices are always going to go up. As new technology develops, and with economies of scale, renewables are getting cheaper. I think we'll get past the tipping point where renewable generation + storage is cheaper than fossil fuels well before we actually run out of gas. Being inefficient with our resources (like burning gas like this) means we'll be much worse off when that happens.

Thats a reduction to absurdity. Gas will be burned, entropy will increase.

If methane is being released, it should be burned. Methane is a more potent green house gas than CO2.

As a pinko commie treehugger (aka realist), I'm unenthusiastic about adding any more CO2 to our atmosphere.

> a shortage of single women

I don't get this. Wouldn't single women also want to move to North Dakota to get a good job?

If and only if the jobs in demand have more or less equal participation between males and females. And.... that's absolutely not the case.

Oil and gas production requires a lot of hard physical labour.

Why would converting deliquefication terminals make sense? By the time we convert them, wouldn't you expect technology transfer of fracking to have spread internationally (AND be much cheaper), making exporting less economically feasible?

The technology has spread but to date no other shale formation has been identified that has the same advantages of those in the US, namely a government friendly to drilling. France has some promising formations but they've banned the tech. There are other possibilities in Poland and Ukraine but there have been difficulties bringing them online.

It's not just about the technology, above-ground risk is in many ways the bigger problem.

But sure, it's a risk inherent in this sort of project. Cheniere Energy was building its Sabine Pass LNG facility in Louisiana to import gas until advances in fracking and horizontal drilling led to a glut of gas in the US market and importing ceased to make sense. Cheniere had to pull off a multi-billion dollar pivot to export instead, scrambling to raise billions and get approval to build the liquefaction trains required to export gas.

(OT: if anyone in Silicon Valley thinks theirs is the only industry ripe with crazy schemes, insane pivots and huge disruptions, read up on energy. The Prize by Daniel Yergin, Private Empire by Steve Coll and The Frackers by Gregory Zuckerman are the places to start)

The challenge with natural gas is capture and transport.

Gas is, well, a gas. It doesn't stay put, and it takes considerable infrastructure to convert it to a more manageable form (compressed or liquified). Both of which are states it doesn't particularly seem inclined to remain in.

There've been enough issues transporting oil from new drilling zones. Transporting gas (by truck, rail, or pipeline) is even more complex.

That's among the reasons oil (and coal) are so useful as fuels sources: they're very convenient. Oil most especially, though even coal can be moved in pipelines (as slurry).

Mind: for both environmental (AGW) and resource limitations (peak oil/gas) reasons we'll have to shift off of them. But the practicality of both coal and oil means that that transition will carry with it immense costs.

Burn it on site for electricity. Imagine it like distributed solar, just with natgas as the power source. Power lines, even low voltage (120-480V), are everywhere.

Worried about cost? Sell carbon credits for the destruction of the greenhouse gas, and use the funds to pay for the generation equipment.

Want someone to manage this huge distributed system of generators? Call SolarCity. They already manage an enormous fleet for distributed solar generation installations.

Low-voltage power lines have high transmission losses (though I'd have to look up just what that is).

The reason for high-voltage lines is that it reduces the total current transmitted, which reduces transmission losses.

Building out T&D infrastructure is expensive and a concern for distributed generation methods (solar, wind).

If I were to have free access to the flaring output, I'd implement this myself out of my own pocket.

You will need a deep pocket. I suspect the cash flow hole between turning a flare into feedstock for electricity generation or any other potentially productive use and getting paid for that product is wide and deep.

Wouldn't have suggested it unless I had deep pockets.

J. Random HN commenter hereby gives you permission to begin disruption.

I don't think anybody disputes that it is expensive to capture and transport natural gas, but it's a solved problem. The state has taken a completely hands-off approach, letting oil companies operate in a manner that maximizes their immediate profits. Since it's cheaper to just burn off the gas, they do that, environmental consequences be damned. You don't see the rate of flaring in other states because other states have much stricter regulations about how long each well can do this.

North Dakota's leadership (which is generally from the eastern part of the state) is too busy counting money and patting themselves on the back for all the economic activity they 'created' to be concerned about the welfare of anybody who actually lives in or around the patch.

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