ND flared 19% of its natural gas production in 2019

Precaud

This sort of thing gives you an idea of the magnitude of excess nat gas production these days. In North Dakota alone, they flared 560 Million CuFt/day of it, presumably due to having no mechanism to get it to market.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=43435&src=email

Jamie Hall

Yep. No pipeline, no market, got to do something with it.

jumper

Used to be a Canadian company,Methanex,that sold oxidizers to convert NG to methanol. Liquid can be stored and transported when gas cannot. Maybe one can mix some methanol with Diesel fuel that frack machines use? Or mixed with the petroleum being produced?

Jamie Hall

The main use of methanol is as a very useful precursor for all sorts of interesting organic compounds. In that use, it is actually quite valuable. The main problems are creating it from methane (hence the Methanex process) -- and the fact that it is highly volatile and remarkably toxic. I suppose it could be added to a crude oil stream, and then recovered at the refinery -- but I doubt that the economics of that would pencil out very well. I don't think it's ever been added to diesel or other fuel oils; because of it's high volatility I suspect it would require recalibration of the injectors, if nothing else. It also attracts water -- so one would likely have most of the corrosion problems that ethanol blended gasoline has -- as well as problems with seal incompatibility (again, like ethanol blended gasoline).

GroundUp

Yet, there is a pipeline from ND coming across the swamp literally 300 yards from my house and nobody around can get NG service. The closest service is 9 miles away despite the pipeline running right through dozens of yards on the way through.

Jamie Hall

The pipeline may be there, @GroundUp , but running at slightly excessive pressures for any sort of residential or commercial use (try around 1,000 psi). The infrastructure to drop that to distribution pressures and so on isn't cheap...

GroundUp

Jamie Hall said:

The pipeline may be there, @GroundUp , but running at slightly excessive pressures for any sort of residential or commercial use (try around 1,000 psi). The infrastructure to drop that to distribution pressures and so on isn't cheap...

Meh, a reducing station is not a big deal nor all that expensive in itself. To pick up each home along the way would be pretty costly I'm sure, but to drop a single reducing station and pick up all the homes in the area with a new line is actually pretty cheap. A few of my rental properties are in an area where this just happened a couple years ago (same pipeline actually) and the cost was pretty minimal, as there were enough homes to split the cost. Like 3 figures per house and there were maybe 25 houses in the 1 sq mile area they connected. Payback compared to propane was less than 1 winter on all 3 of mine.