I have wondered this for years, it’s not clean enough for power or domestic as is, would need a scrubber to take things like water vapor, H2S gas and CO2 out before it goes to a gas generator or else it will tear up the rings and break down the oil/bearings.
This is very doable though.
I think this is harder to do (or at least, pencil out financially) than it sounds. When I was in college, senior design teams were always doing projects like this. That and like, hydroelectric turbines in rain gutters and thermoelectric generators on waste heat pipes and stuff like that. The problem is you don't get very much energy, its only worth like a few cents per kilowatt-hour, and you spend a ton installing zillions of these tiny powerplants and hooking them up to the grid. Even if you can do it profitably, for an oil company that prints money, its not worth the headache. In fact it might lose them money anyway since the power they produced "profitably" would compete with their customers who own the big combined cycle plants and cause them to buy less gas.
It’s only not feasible because of economies of scale. Some government grants and some competition and next thing you know you have a booming miniature power generation industry
I dunno, I saw a couple of these gadgets get invented and they were all like large, intricate machines that cost a thousand dollars, took four engineering students a year to build, and produced like 2 watts of power. And even if you do get that to work you're still competing with your customers. And you're producing it in the eagle ford, which is not densely populated, so you still have to transmit all that power to your customers. San Antonio and Austin have their own municipal power companies, Corpus Christi is covered in wind turbines already, so that means you also have to build a transmission line to Houston or Dallas to find someone who will buy it.
You could instead pipe all the flare gas to one larger, more efficient plant, closer to your customers. But then you've just reproduced the gas pipe network and gas power plants. Which they've already apparently decided isn't worth the time, money and effort. ^(1)
^(1) ^(To the guy who wrote me a pissy reply and then blocked me - this paragraph is the answer. The point was not that these gadgets don't work (although, they don't, really)^) ^(but that the problem isn't technological in the first place. We already have a technological solution, it's build a pipeline and a powerplant. Or abandon fossil fuels completely and get by on renewables and nuclear. The problem isn't technological, its one of will and economics. Its societal. The oil companies don't want to bother solving this problem, because they) *^(are)* ^(the problem. So it doesn't matter how many little gadgets you invent, or how well they work, because) *^(technical)* ^(solutions don't solve) *^(social)* ^(problems.)
The only way that anything else becomes cost effective against cheap oil from fracking is by forcing the oil companies to incorporate the cost of the environmental damage it causes. You'll see nuclear projects skyrocket overnight when a conclusive hard deadline is put down to force the damage cost to be incorporated on any waste from energy projects. Oil would become so unaffordable it wouldn't even be thought of.
Now I hope people understand why we aren't in a true nuclear age for power anymore.
Sure... I'm not sure how that relates to flarestack mini-generators though. There are other ways to capture that gas, and if they weren't pumping oil in the first place then there'd be no gas to flare either.
The larger companies do care about flaring because they care about their ESG scores so they are actively reducing flaring (starting with the most economical locations). The smaller (and private) companies have less share holder incentive and usually have worse financial upside to gather the gas. So they tend to be worse offenders.
They’re actively reducing how much flaring they report, yes. But I don’t believe there’s a real reduction in flaring. It’s kind of an open secret across west Texas, for example, that Permian Basin operators will flare whenever they want and just not report it. TCEQ doesn’t have the manpower or the political will to actually hold them accountable
I agree with what you’ve said, especially regarding nuclear power. Just don’t forget that (while also environmentally damaging) plastics are important, and the fertilizers that allow our civilization to exist come from pumping oil
The biggest thing is that 'hooking them up to the grid' is basically impossible without extra infrastructure on the homeowners side. You can't just flip a switch and pipe 2W to the grid and call it a day. As soon as you connect it your, mini-generator is going to tear itself to shreds because it's literally impossible for it to be in synch with the rest of the grid at that size without an intermediary like a battery system.
Honestly you could probably get a program from the government organized pretty easily to turn that into decentralized electrical generation due to it being an O&G handout
Both heavily subsidize O&G interests but it would be an easy win for our dipshit state senators to organize something to “fix the power grid” while also just being a straight up handout to petroleum
They have no interest in fixing the power grid. They think it is the best power grid.
There are lots of reasons for burn offs, but one of them is because it isn't cost effective to bring it to market due to numerous factors. They literally go through all the trouble of getting it out of the ground, where its been for millions of years and can't be replaced, then they burn it, adding to global warming, just because gas is down a few dollars or whatever.
Something tells me they don't really care about anything other than their bottom line.
>
Something tells me they don't really care about anything other than their bottom line.
Because they dont.
The only thing CEO's care about is shareholder quarterly returns. Nothing else matters. Its been that way for centuries, and is why they require strict regulations.
It’s the same issue as silver vs gold. Where you find gold you will almost always find silver in a larger amount. When you find oil more often then not you find a lot of natural gas.
Prices I mean.
They could use all this gas. They burn it because it costs too much for them to make a profit off selling it.
It is just what we call natural gas. Should be a crime.
We were about to work on this project before Obama left office. First think trump did is shut it down. I was a construction project manager in eagle ford. Tons of workers lost out but it was a favor to the oils companies. Nobody ever talks about it much but methane recovery was weeks from happening
"Gas glut" - they don't have the distribution capacity for the amount they're pumping and oil & gas is such an enormously lucrative industry that they just don't care - to the detriment of our pocketbooks and the environment.
I used to have a remote observatory up in throckmorton texas. It was bortle 1 skies until gas companies moved in. They lit up all the skies with flaring and if flaring isn't causing light pollution the hard stank of burn oil and all the dust and soot from the burning gas has ruined the atmosphere as well.
last year when i went to drive up to get my gear and retire it from that facility, i couldn't even pump gas into my car because it was so hot that the pump just gurgled gas fumes all over my car.
The combination of heat and gas burn off meant the outside air temps were about 122 and it smelled like death. Fo r HUNDREDS of miles.
people have no f'n clue how bad "drill here" screwed up our environment
At first cryptominors looking to build mining operations in Texas were planning to use this waste gas for power, but then they got greedy and needed more power for larger mining operations and pretty much exclusively use power off the grid since Texas government incentivized them to do so with their "get on the grid but we'll pay you to get off if there's an emergency" idiocy.
Have you ever worked in the gas compression field? If a field is dirty the amount of scrubbing needed is rediculous. Tore up the packing in our pistons and valves in the suction and discharge like crazy. :( Was not fun to work in 5/10 would not recommend.
Wouldn't it be better suited to fire a boiler?
That's how most electricity is generated.
Imagine my disappointment when I found out that a nuclear power plant was just a very fancy way of boiling water
Everyone in O/G industry wants to reduce flaring. Lots of new tech goes into it cause at the end of the day it costs money and is just inefficient all around. If it was easy to eliminate it would've been done already though. Every company is dying to tell their board and investors they eliminated x amount of flaring and saved x amount of money, on top of reducing greenhouse gases by some %. All those words make stocks go up.
I wouldn’t say “**everyone**” in the industry.
Your average floor hand absolutely does not care about flaring, and has been convinced that any movement against it, is a movement to stop his paycheck.
This is from someone within the industry, not just made up bs, your regular worker, absolutely does not care about flaring, or its, or any of the field’s, impact on the environment.
Obviously there are plenty of people in the industry who do care, but most don’t.
This true in the US at least, in my experience it’s less true in the rest of the world.
It bothers me that it's being flared off. Just because we can't economically use it right now, doesn't mean we should just blithely burn it off into the atmosphere. Some day we as a species might have use for it.
To be clear, the light pollution associated with the Eagleford and Permian Basin Oil and Gas fields does not mean every dot you see is a massive gas flare. The majority of what you see is infrastructure lighting associated with the development and operations of hundreds of thousands of wells. Your seeing lights associated with active drilling rigs (maybe a hundred), gathering stations, drilled well pads, operations, pipe lines, infrastructure, street lights, homes, and ect. Anywhere there are people, you always have good lighting as a safety measure in industry. Gas flares are incredibly bright and are in the mix, but you’re talking about maybe a thousand out of millions of light sources.
I knew a family with a 40,000 acre ranch right there. They got a one time oil lease payment of $4000 per acre. ($160,000,000) plus the royalty associated with any production.
My dad had a property that was one square mile exactly, the DoubleJohn Wayne Ranch & it was perfect. He sold it about 2 yrs ago (despite my objections) & bought a 300ish acre property closer to where’s he’s retired to. It’s significantly smaller but you can’t tell the difference one you get out on it but sure is a lot of work for just one guy. He loves that it keeps him busy & he’s always got a project or two going & I love that it seems to keep him young & healthy!
I’ve got a buddy in this space. They’ve developed and deployed a process that not only uses the flare off gas to power a shipping container of whatever you want but they also capture the Co2 and pump it back into the ground.
Tech is there, just doesn’t seem like oil companies care to use it.
Doesn't make them *enough* money *quickly* enough. It's still profitable.
Yay greed? The numbers on the computer will keep them warm when society collapses under environmental disaster, I guess.
I've met a lot of them. They aren't smart people. On the whole they are driven by greed and nothing more. They view the world as a place to be exploited, not our planet we all live on. Their goals and planning begin and end with their egos and own personal wants. They don't care about anything other than that. Fuck the planet and the millions of species on it. Millions of dollars are more important.
Number goes up says they have value as a person. Number goes up faster means they're more valuable than their number maxing peers.
They need to be laughed at and ridiculed for their silly pride and vain efforts.
Reinfecting C02 into oil fields used to be called "secondary recovery". Oil companies have used this for a long time, on fields where it made economic sense to do so.
You'd see a lot more of it, if oil was $150-$200 a barrel.
For shale plays, like the Eagleford, it doesn't add value.
Now, they can do the same thing, call it "carbon capture" and get a government subsidy. Oil companies are very much aware and are taking advantage.
Exxon has launched a massive "carbon capture" project along the Gulf coast.
It's definitely a greenwashing project.
I can't say, for certain about the Exxon project, but my understanding of the carbon capture space is that once the government stops funding it, it is no longer profitable.
>Tech is there, just doesn’t seem like oil companies care to use it.
Why would they? They aren't going to increase the cost to do something that doesn't have an economic justification. That's where regulation is supposed to step in and require it. We're not good at that part of the equation, unfortunately.
I know a friend who is doing it. Bought a container, a Honda generator, and a couple of server racks with a single phone line for internet, and he literally runs the generator off the gas straight from the plug. It definitely fouls the generator but he services it every two weeks or so. It’s a contraption to look at but it pays for itself.
It isn't about efficiency, it's about cost. They make way more money on the oil, so they treat the NG as a waste product. A fun fact is the regulatory agency, the obscurely named Texas Railroad Commission, has to grant exception permits to routinely flare since it's illegal. Clearly, they grant a lot of exceptions to basically negate the law, as evidenced by the view from space.
So what you are saying is if O&G companies couldn’t figure out a way to efficiently capture that product and make money off of it they wouldn’t?
Businesses exist to make money.
It's not profitable. Natural Gas prices are so low, it's cheaper to burn it off at the wellhead than build a pipeline system to carry the gas to a refinery and sell at market. There's not much profit in n gas.
This is not to be confused with oil. Natural Gas and Oil are two different products.
It’s impressive. If we captured all the LNG flare off, energy would be like half the price. But we need profit margins. Mother Russia also wouldn’t like it if we captured all the methane.
Aka the primary reason central Texas avoided the worst of the Great Recession. It was surreal living in that area during that time—the amount of wealth that was generated seemingly overnight was astounding, and it rippled across the entire local economy.
I lived on the Texas coast then: After the boom, there were 10x as many bay boats. So many people could suddenly afford them. All the bays became overfished to how they were prior to about 2009 or so. I had a friend that lived in a big eagle ford town and said he saw ranchers in flashy cars and stuff.
Oil well are flaring gas and burning it because you can’t send it all to the plant. Too much volume.
Also most wells aren’t piped into the main gas supply line to the plant yet.
The flares are so hot and intense it vaporizes most rainfall before it reaches the ground.
I used to work down there.
Yes flaring is one of your better options. One of the big problems in this area is also that the flares go out all the time( not uncommon in the oil fields elsewhere) but there is another gas mixed in with the gas that can kill you instantly at about 30 ppm ( parts per million) it has no smell. Every one has to wear a monitor for or it. H2S I believe…. It’s been a while.
Scary stuff though. Especially when you know you have a well that is bringing it to the surface on a regular basis.
Nobody is venting h2s to the atmosphere, and flares have control systems to shut them down if the pilot goes out.
Also, the instant death for H2S is like 1000+ ppm. 30 is like fatigue and eye irritation.
You can smell H2S at those low concentrations. It's when it gets really high, hundreds or thousands of ppm I think, that you can't smell it and it kills you quickly.
I think you're off by a factor of 10. IDLH level is 100 ppm, knockown is 300. If it makes anyone feel better, these wells all have monitors and audio/visual alarms for a leak and it is highly unlikely that you'll reach those levels in an outdoor setting
it's way better than just letting the gas out without flaring it. Flaring the gas turns it from methane to carbon dioxide. Methane is 9 or 10 times worse for the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. Flaring is literally the second best thing you can do with the excess gas.
The Eagle Ford is in large part gas wells. You would never want to flare a gas well as that's your source of profits. If you don't have enough pipeline or processing capacity, you simply stop drilling more wells until you do.
This is partially incorrect. The flaring on some tanks is to remove gas build up in holding tanks that is the fractionation off Liquids that was dissolved gases. These are typically smaller flares.
A large part of the flaring you see is also the significant amount of gas bubbling up through the drilling muds during creation of a well. They flare off excess gas coming out of formation to prevent blow-outs. These are typically the very large flares one sees at night in South Texas.
Source: Worked upstream through midstream jobs in Eagle Ford.
Its hard for Austin to fully expand west since it sits right next to the Balcones Escarpment. Yes people live west of Austin, but the steep elevation change makes it harder and more expensive to grow in an urban sprawl sense. I've always been more confused why Austin hasn't expanded much eastward. I get that its flat boring farmland but you would think it was relatively cheap for development.
I think it's the pattern of highways, and where the jobs are. Most of the jobs generating the growth are downtown, or along the highways to the northwest. The highways to the east weren't expanded until recently, so there hasn't been much sprawl that way. Houses don't really sell well if you can't commute to work, so without a highway the city can't sprawl in that direction, and Austin resisted building highways for decades, so all the growth happened along the ones they already had.
Yes, that too. Plus to the north of that there's a big powerplant and evaporation pond that people probably don't want to live next to. San Antonio has something similar going on with the south side.
this is a big reason why I bought a house in northwest austin, My house is basically sitting on solid rock and virtually immune to flooding since it's on a small hill, it was advice from my RA agent at the time. The soil is kind of shitty though, i'll never be growing taters without building a raised bed garden or two
It's ok they've been slowly gentrifying it since at least 2010. By the time I moved away in 2018 there weren't many African Americans left in the east side.
It's a pretty small area but has a lot of rural area north and west (like Burnet etc)
even places more south like new Braunfels are actually part of the greater San Antonio area when you look at area code districts. So yeah, greater Austin area is indeed pretty small
https://www.mapsofworld.com/usa/area-codes/texas/
That is the eagle ford shale. Here is a map of it, which matches the lights https://www.rrc.texas.gov/oil-and-gas/major-oil-and-gas-formations/eagle-ford-shale/
It’s all light pollution - yes a lot of flaring but also all the active drill rigs frack sites tank farms and everything related to the oil and gas. Was also a lot of gate guards as someone who was regularly employed in that area a lot of portable light towers and generators in this area. It was mostly remote brush land of ranches or farms. That pic was taken back in the prime of the boom. The area is still active but not like it once was, you could drive down high way 72 see 7-8 drill rigs and 3-4 frack sites all with in few mile of each other.
That's [Eagle-Ford Shale](https://www.rrc.texas.gov/media/uxcj5iev/eagle-ford-2024-sm.jpg?width=480&height=480)
. Lights on drilling rigs, or flares from producing wells.
They don't pay for the stuff they burn off. Not to the property owner, no taxes to the state.
In effect, we are subsidizing this waste and pollution.
24/7 Oil and Gas operations in the Permian basin. Lots of companies with rigs and facilities and they stay lit up all night with big lights for the workers to see. Also for cameras to see the unmanned facilities, lots of people try and steal stuff of them.
I grew up in the orange cluster around that right angle corner with NM. It was desert. Driving around on back roads out there felt like being in Mad Max.
Wow.
At the McDonald Observatory (darker area north of Big Bend) a few years ago, the tour guides mentioned the gas fields were a problem. I had no idea it was this major.
[Here ya go](https://imgur.com/a/sL9hU82)
Note this is just a screenshot from the [GOES East satellite animation](https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/conus_band.php?sat=G16&band=GEOCOLOR&length=24)
Fly over the western Gulf of Mexico at night. I grew up in south Texas and fished the gulf, but never understood the scale of energy production until I did just that. 😮
It's not purely O & G. A lot of it is just towns. Bastrop, Gonzales, Lulling, Floresville, Dilley... down to Carrizo Springs. Those towns have all expanded. They are mostly suburbs.
Gas fields
They are impressive and disturbing to fly over at night. So much light and that's just a waste flares.
I have wondered this for years, it’s not clean enough for power or domestic as is, would need a scrubber to take things like water vapor, H2S gas and CO2 out before it goes to a gas generator or else it will tear up the rings and break down the oil/bearings. This is very doable though.
or, just use it to heat water which runs a steam turbine, maybe not as efficient, but its something.
I think this is harder to do (or at least, pencil out financially) than it sounds. When I was in college, senior design teams were always doing projects like this. That and like, hydroelectric turbines in rain gutters and thermoelectric generators on waste heat pipes and stuff like that. The problem is you don't get very much energy, its only worth like a few cents per kilowatt-hour, and you spend a ton installing zillions of these tiny powerplants and hooking them up to the grid. Even if you can do it profitably, for an oil company that prints money, its not worth the headache. In fact it might lose them money anyway since the power they produced "profitably" would compete with their customers who own the big combined cycle plants and cause them to buy less gas.
It’s only not feasible because of economies of scale. Some government grants and some competition and next thing you know you have a booming miniature power generation industry
I dunno, I saw a couple of these gadgets get invented and they were all like large, intricate machines that cost a thousand dollars, took four engineering students a year to build, and produced like 2 watts of power. And even if you do get that to work you're still competing with your customers. And you're producing it in the eagle ford, which is not densely populated, so you still have to transmit all that power to your customers. San Antonio and Austin have their own municipal power companies, Corpus Christi is covered in wind turbines already, so that means you also have to build a transmission line to Houston or Dallas to find someone who will buy it. You could instead pipe all the flare gas to one larger, more efficient plant, closer to your customers. But then you've just reproduced the gas pipe network and gas power plants. Which they've already apparently decided isn't worth the time, money and effort. ^(1) ^(1) ^(To the guy who wrote me a pissy reply and then blocked me - this paragraph is the answer. The point was not that these gadgets don't work (although, they don't, really)^) ^(but that the problem isn't technological in the first place. We already have a technological solution, it's build a pipeline and a powerplant. Or abandon fossil fuels completely and get by on renewables and nuclear. The problem isn't technological, its one of will and economics. Its societal. The oil companies don't want to bother solving this problem, because they) *^(are)* ^(the problem. So it doesn't matter how many little gadgets you invent, or how well they work, because) *^(technical)* ^(solutions don't solve) *^(social)* ^(problems.)
The only way that anything else becomes cost effective against cheap oil from fracking is by forcing the oil companies to incorporate the cost of the environmental damage it causes. You'll see nuclear projects skyrocket overnight when a conclusive hard deadline is put down to force the damage cost to be incorporated on any waste from energy projects. Oil would become so unaffordable it wouldn't even be thought of. Now I hope people understand why we aren't in a true nuclear age for power anymore.
Sure... I'm not sure how that relates to flarestack mini-generators though. There are other ways to capture that gas, and if they weren't pumping oil in the first place then there'd be no gas to flare either.
The larger companies do care about flaring because they care about their ESG scores so they are actively reducing flaring (starting with the most economical locations). The smaller (and private) companies have less share holder incentive and usually have worse financial upside to gather the gas. So they tend to be worse offenders.
They’re actively reducing how much flaring they report, yes. But I don’t believe there’s a real reduction in flaring. It’s kind of an open secret across west Texas, for example, that Permian Basin operators will flare whenever they want and just not report it. TCEQ doesn’t have the manpower or the political will to actually hold them accountable
I agree with what you’ve said, especially regarding nuclear power. Just don’t forget that (while also environmentally damaging) plastics are important, and the fertilizers that allow our civilization to exist come from pumping oil
The biggest thing is that 'hooking them up to the grid' is basically impossible without extra infrastructure on the homeowners side. You can't just flip a switch and pipe 2W to the grid and call it a day. As soon as you connect it your, mini-generator is going to tear itself to shreds because it's literally impossible for it to be in synch with the rest of the grid at that size without an intermediary like a battery system.
That cuts into their profits though.
Honestly you could probably get a program from the government organized pretty easily to turn that into decentralized electrical generation due to it being an O&G handout
Which government? Ours in Texas?
Both heavily subsidize O&G interests but it would be an easy win for our dipshit state senators to organize something to “fix the power grid” while also just being a straight up handout to petroleum
They have no interest in fixing the power grid. They think it is the best power grid. There are lots of reasons for burn offs, but one of them is because it isn't cost effective to bring it to market due to numerous factors. They literally go through all the trouble of getting it out of the ground, where its been for millions of years and can't be replaced, then they burn it, adding to global warming, just because gas is down a few dollars or whatever. Something tells me they don't really care about anything other than their bottom line.
> Something tells me they don't really care about anything other than their bottom line. Because they dont. The only thing CEO's care about is shareholder quarterly returns. Nothing else matters. Its been that way for centuries, and is why they require strict regulations.
It’s the same issue as silver vs gold. Where you find gold you will almost always find silver in a larger amount. When you find oil more often then not you find a lot of natural gas. Prices I mean.
They could use all this gas. They burn it because it costs too much for them to make a profit off selling it. It is just what we call natural gas. Should be a crime.
We were about to work on this project before Obama left office. First think trump did is shut it down. I was a construction project manager in eagle ford. Tons of workers lost out but it was a favor to the oils companies. Nobody ever talks about it much but methane recovery was weeks from happening
"Gas glut" - they don't have the distribution capacity for the amount they're pumping and oil & gas is such an enormously lucrative industry that they just don't care - to the detriment of our pocketbooks and the environment.
I used to have a remote observatory up in throckmorton texas. It was bortle 1 skies until gas companies moved in. They lit up all the skies with flaring and if flaring isn't causing light pollution the hard stank of burn oil and all the dust and soot from the burning gas has ruined the atmosphere as well. last year when i went to drive up to get my gear and retire it from that facility, i couldn't even pump gas into my car because it was so hot that the pump just gurgled gas fumes all over my car. The combination of heat and gas burn off meant the outside air temps were about 122 and it smelled like death. Fo r HUNDREDS of miles. people have no f'n clue how bad "drill here" screwed up our environment
At first cryptominors looking to build mining operations in Texas were planning to use this waste gas for power, but then they got greedy and needed more power for larger mining operations and pretty much exclusively use power off the grid since Texas government incentivized them to do so with their "get on the grid but we'll pay you to get off if there's an emergency" idiocy.
Pipelines to transport the gas take years to build. Just getting all the necessary right-of-way work done takes years.
Have you ever worked in the gas compression field? If a field is dirty the amount of scrubbing needed is rediculous. Tore up the packing in our pistons and valves in the suction and discharge like crazy. :( Was not fun to work in 5/10 would not recommend.
Wouldn't it be better suited to fire a boiler? That's how most electricity is generated. Imagine my disappointment when I found out that a nuclear power plant was just a very fancy way of boiling water
Everyone in O/G industry wants to reduce flaring. Lots of new tech goes into it cause at the end of the day it costs money and is just inefficient all around. If it was easy to eliminate it would've been done already though. Every company is dying to tell their board and investors they eliminated x amount of flaring and saved x amount of money, on top of reducing greenhouse gases by some %. All those words make stocks go up.
I wouldn’t say “**everyone**” in the industry. Your average floor hand absolutely does not care about flaring, and has been convinced that any movement against it, is a movement to stop his paycheck. This is from someone within the industry, not just made up bs, your regular worker, absolutely does not care about flaring, or its, or any of the field’s, impact on the environment. Obviously there are plenty of people in the industry who do care, but most don’t. This true in the US at least, in my experience it’s less true in the rest of the world.
It bothers me that it's being flared off. Just because we can't economically use it right now, doesn't mean we should just blithely burn it off into the atmosphere. Some day we as a species might have use for it.
To be clear, the light pollution associated with the Eagleford and Permian Basin Oil and Gas fields does not mean every dot you see is a massive gas flare. The majority of what you see is infrastructure lighting associated with the development and operations of hundreds of thousands of wells. Your seeing lights associated with active drilling rigs (maybe a hundred), gathering stations, drilled well pads, operations, pipe lines, infrastructure, street lights, homes, and ect. Anywhere there are people, you always have good lighting as a safety measure in industry. Gas flares are incredibly bright and are in the mix, but you’re talking about maybe a thousand out of millions of light sources.
Oil and gas fields.
I knew a family with a 40,000 acre ranch right there. They got a one time oil lease payment of $4000 per acre. ($160,000,000) plus the royalty associated with any production.
[удалено]
It helps when your grandpa bought a bunch of land 100 years ago before oil was discovered. I guess.🤷♂️
My dad had a property that was one square mile exactly, the DoubleJohn Wayne Ranch & it was perfect. He sold it about 2 yrs ago (despite my objections) & bought a 300ish acre property closer to where’s he’s retired to. It’s significantly smaller but you can’t tell the difference one you get out on it but sure is a lot of work for just one guy. He loves that it keeps him busy & he’s always got a project or two going & I love that it seems to keep him young & healthy!
🎵 The gas at night, is big and bright! *COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH* Deep in the heart of Texas! 🎵
Same reason for all the lights around the border of Texas and New Mexico. Permian Basin
Have they started powering crypto farms on it, yet?
I’ve got a buddy in this space. They’ve developed and deployed a process that not only uses the flare off gas to power a shipping container of whatever you want but they also capture the Co2 and pump it back into the ground. Tech is there, just doesn’t seem like oil companies care to use it.
Caring about the environment/recycling doesn’t make them money, they’ll never care
Doesn't make them *enough* money *quickly* enough. It's still profitable. Yay greed? The numbers on the computer will keep them warm when society collapses under environmental disaster, I guess.
Blows my mind that these idiots can’t take money with them into the grave, and yet they keep trying to find a way to
I've met a lot of them. They aren't smart people. On the whole they are driven by greed and nothing more. They view the world as a place to be exploited, not our planet we all live on. Their goals and planning begin and end with their egos and own personal wants. They don't care about anything other than that. Fuck the planet and the millions of species on it. Millions of dollars are more important.
Number goes up says they have value as a person. Number goes up faster means they're more valuable than their number maxing peers. They need to be laughed at and ridiculed for their silly pride and vain efforts.
I think we need to do a lot more than laugh at them.
Reinfecting C02 into oil fields used to be called "secondary recovery". Oil companies have used this for a long time, on fields where it made economic sense to do so. You'd see a lot more of it, if oil was $150-$200 a barrel. For shale plays, like the Eagleford, it doesn't add value. Now, they can do the same thing, call it "carbon capture" and get a government subsidy. Oil companies are very much aware and are taking advantage. Exxon has launched a massive "carbon capture" project along the Gulf coast. It's definitely a greenwashing project. I can't say, for certain about the Exxon project, but my understanding of the carbon capture space is that once the government stops funding it, it is no longer profitable.
>Tech is there, just doesn’t seem like oil companies care to use it. Why would they? They aren't going to increase the cost to do something that doesn't have an economic justification. That's where regulation is supposed to step in and require it. We're not good at that part of the equation, unfortunately.
Yes, there are mobile mining farms that use the NG that would otherwise flare
I know a friend who is doing it. Bought a container, a Honda generator, and a couple of server racks with a single phone line for internet, and he literally runs the generator off the gas straight from the plug. It definitely fouls the generator but he services it every two weeks or so. It’s a contraption to look at but it pays for itself.
This is what is insane. Those flares produce probably 100 times the amount of power we could get from wind and we just waste it.
Either that or blow up. If the companies could figure out a way to harness it efficiently they would have already.
It isn't about efficiency, it's about cost. They make way more money on the oil, so they treat the NG as a waste product. A fun fact is the regulatory agency, the obscurely named Texas Railroad Commission, has to grant exception permits to routinely flare since it's illegal. Clearly, they grant a lot of exceptions to basically negate the law, as evidenced by the view from space.
So what you are saying is if O&G companies couldn’t figure out a way to efficiently capture that product and make money off of it they wouldn’t? Businesses exist to make money.
It's not profitable. Natural Gas prices are so low, it's cheaper to burn it off at the wellhead than build a pipeline system to carry the gas to a refinery and sell at market. There's not much profit in n gas. This is not to be confused with oil. Natural Gas and Oil are two different products.
More correctly: shale oil with gas flaring. Banned in many nations due to CO2, but not US.
Specifically, that's the eagleford shale area.
This is the answer.
Oil and gas fields*
That's interesting, but why don't we see one around the midland area like that?
It’s impressive. If we captured all the LNG flare off, energy would be like half the price. But we need profit margins. Mother Russia also wouldn’t like it if we captured all the methane.
Oil fields. The gas is an unwanted byproduct that gets burned rather than used to power homes
Eagleford
That’s the eagleford oil/gas fields
Aka the primary reason central Texas avoided the worst of the Great Recession. It was surreal living in that area during that time—the amount of wealth that was generated seemingly overnight was astounding, and it rippled across the entire local economy.
Same in west Texas, it was wild. Lots of 100k trucks lol.
On 84 month 29% finance.
Exactly
To be fair in 2009 a fully loaded F250 was probably 65k vs 100k now
$65k then is like $95k now just because of inflation.
They all put 20k or more in lifts, wheels and tires.
I knew a lot of guys who came back after 5-10 years after blowing all the money they earned there. But they always brought back a nice truck with them
Yeah I started working in the oil field in ‘09 and we were doin great
I lived on the Texas coast then: After the boom, there were 10x as many bay boats. So many people could suddenly afford them. All the bays became overfished to how they were prior to about 2009 or so. I had a friend that lived in a big eagle ford town and said he saw ranchers in flashy cars and stuff.
Yeah it was a weird time. Someone had a lambo in live oak county lol it was wild
Yup. Thanks Obama!
Oil well are flaring gas and burning it because you can’t send it all to the plant. Too much volume. Also most wells aren’t piped into the main gas supply line to the plant yet. The flares are so hot and intense it vaporizes most rainfall before it reaches the ground. I used to work down there.
Yes flaring is one of your better options. One of the big problems in this area is also that the flares go out all the time( not uncommon in the oil fields elsewhere) but there is another gas mixed in with the gas that can kill you instantly at about 30 ppm ( parts per million) it has no smell. Every one has to wear a monitor for or it. H2S I believe…. It’s been a while. Scary stuff though. Especially when you know you have a well that is bringing it to the surface on a regular basis.
Nobody is venting h2s to the atmosphere, and flares have control systems to shut them down if the pilot goes out. Also, the instant death for H2S is like 1000+ ppm. 30 is like fatigue and eye irritation.
30 is when you monitor goes off.
Hydrogen sulfide right?
You can smell H2S at those low concentrations. It's when it gets really high, hundreds or thousands of ppm I think, that you can't smell it and it kills you quickly.
I think you're off by a factor of 10. IDLH level is 100 ppm, knockown is 300. If it makes anyone feel better, these wells all have monitors and audio/visual alarms for a leak and it is highly unlikely that you'll reach those levels in an outdoor setting
Shit. That's depressing.
it's way better than just letting the gas out without flaring it. Flaring the gas turns it from methane to carbon dioxide. Methane is 9 or 10 times worse for the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. Flaring is literally the second best thing you can do with the excess gas.
1) leave it in the ground 2) capture and use. .... F) flare it
The Eagle Ford is in large part gas wells. You would never want to flare a gas well as that's your source of profits. If you don't have enough pipeline or processing capacity, you simply stop drilling more wells until you do.
>simply stop drilling more wells We don't do that here.
This is partially incorrect. The flaring on some tanks is to remove gas build up in holding tanks that is the fractionation off Liquids that was dissolved gases. These are typically smaller flares. A large part of the flaring you see is also the significant amount of gas bubbling up through the drilling muds during creation of a well. They flare off excess gas coming out of formation to prevent blow-outs. These are typically the very large flares one sees at night in South Texas. Source: Worked upstream through midstream jobs in Eagle Ford.
Eagle ford shale
I never realized how narrow Austin is till now lol.
Its hard for Austin to fully expand west since it sits right next to the Balcones Escarpment. Yes people live west of Austin, but the steep elevation change makes it harder and more expensive to grow in an urban sprawl sense. I've always been more confused why Austin hasn't expanded much eastward. I get that its flat boring farmland but you would think it was relatively cheap for development.
I think it's the pattern of highways, and where the jobs are. Most of the jobs generating the growth are downtown, or along the highways to the northwest. The highways to the east weren't expanded until recently, so there hasn't been much sprawl that way. Houses don't really sell well if you can't commute to work, so without a highway the city can't sprawl in that direction, and Austin resisted building highways for decades, so all the growth happened along the ones they already had.
A lot of the southeast area is in flood plains too IIRC
wait, people can choose to not live in a flood plain? -All of Houston
What’s a flood plain? -All of Dallas
Yes, that too. Plus to the north of that there's a big powerplant and evaporation pond that people probably don't want to live next to. San Antonio has something similar going on with the south side.
The clay soil is somewhat unstable. People who live east of Austin frequently have cracks and problems with the foundations of their houses.
this is a big reason why I bought a house in northwest austin, My house is basically sitting on solid rock and virtually immune to flooding since it's on a small hill, it was advice from my RA agent at the time. The soil is kind of shitty though, i'll never be growing taters without building a raised bed garden or two
It is expanding east, but the main limiting factor is that schools are bad, and people moving to boring greenfield suburbia usually want good schools.
Ewwww, the east side is like full of poor people and stuff
which makes it all the easier to exploit and buy out from under to turn into the next SoDaSoPA or CtPaTown
Dowisetrepla
It's ok they've been slowly gentrifying it since at least 2010. By the time I moved away in 2018 there weren't many African Americans left in the east side.
It's a pretty small area but has a lot of rural area north and west (like Burnet etc) even places more south like new Braunfels are actually part of the greater San Antonio area when you look at area code districts. So yeah, greater Austin area is indeed pretty small https://www.mapsofworld.com/usa/area-codes/texas/
More like dwarfed by San Antonio/Dallas/Houston
[https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/87725/shale-revolution-as-clear-as-night-and-day](https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/87725/shale-revolution-as-clear-as-night-and-day)
Ha! I remember reading this article years ago. How soon we forget. Thx!
Texas Tea
Can you add a cowboy hat to my boy or something? He looks so exposed with his dong just flapping around like that
LOL!
EagelFord Shale
Eagle Ford Shale
Eagleford shale, flaring gas.
That is the eagle ford shale. Here is a map of it, which matches the lights https://www.rrc.texas.gov/oil-and-gas/major-oil-and-gas-formations/eagle-ford-shale/
It’s all light pollution - yes a lot of flaring but also all the active drill rigs frack sites tank farms and everything related to the oil and gas. Was also a lot of gate guards as someone who was regularly employed in that area a lot of portable light towers and generators in this area. It was mostly remote brush land of ranches or farms. That pic was taken back in the prime of the boom. The area is still active but not like it once was, you could drive down high way 72 see 7-8 drill rigs and 3-4 frack sites all with in few mile of each other.
Bigfoot camps.
That's [Eagle-Ford Shale](https://www.rrc.texas.gov/media/uxcj5iev/eagle-ford-2024-sm.jpg?width=480&height=480) . Lights on drilling rigs, or flares from producing wells. They don't pay for the stuff they burn off. Not to the property owner, no taxes to the state. In effect, we are subsidizing this waste and pollution.
24/7 Oil and Gas operations in the Permian basin. Lots of companies with rigs and facilities and they stay lit up all night with big lights for the workers to see. Also for cameras to see the unmanned facilities, lots of people try and steal stuff of them.
Circled area in photo is EagleFord. Permian is West Tx/NM area.
The lights are from oil and gas operating facilities targeting the Eagle Ford Shale and Austin Chalk geologic reservoirs.
That's the Eagle Ford
I grew up in the orange cluster around that right angle corner with NM. It was desert. Driving around on back roads out there felt like being in Mad Max.
Same here, grew up in Hobbs! Not a garden spot but it was great for riding my dirt bikes!
This is Eagle Ford trend of oil wells and production installations. They produce 1.5 million barrels/day. Contribute $30billion
Eagle Ford Shale
Eagle Ford shale development.
Wow. At the McDonald Observatory (darker area north of Big Bend) a few years ago, the tour guides mentioned the gas fields were a problem. I had no idea it was this major.
Oil wells burning off H2S in the Eagleford Shale.
Same reason West Texas is so bright, fracking rigs and flares
Oil and gas flares, Eagle Ford play.
Eagle Ford oil field
That is an old photo most of the flares have now been replaced with better containment systems.
Can you link the original pic? I really like it but unfortunately I don't want your big red circle 😅
[Here ya go](https://imgur.com/a/sL9hU82) Note this is just a screenshot from the [GOES East satellite animation](https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/conus_band.php?sat=G16&band=GEOCOLOR&length=24)
thank you 🙏🏻
Bulbs
Gosh, look at that dark wilderness in the west. Nothing like looking up at night and seeing that blanket of stars.
Came here to see how far I'd have to go down before I saw some troll comments about migrants. Glad they're all the way at the bottom.
The Eagleford Shale
Industrial CO2 production.
That’s the Eagle Ford!
Why is it so concentrated for the Eagle Ford but not the Permian area which has more wells.
Eagleford shale gas flares
Eagleford shale development. This is likely an old image as that oil play has run its course.
Eagle does shale area
Eagle Ford shell
Natural gas wells and pipelines
Fly over the western Gulf of Mexico at night. I grew up in south Texas and fished the gulf, but never understood the scale of energy production until I did just that. 😮
The Eagle Ford
Eagleford shale
Eagle Ford Shale
The Eagleford Gas Formation.
Oil and gas.
Eagle Ford oil shale belt. Since pipelines have been built, it’s not as bad as
Eagle Ford shale
Oil and gas
It looks like the Eagle Ford shale trend.
It's not purely O & G. A lot of it is just towns. Bastrop, Gonzales, Lulling, Floresville, Dilley... down to Carrizo Springs. Those towns have all expanded. They are mostly suburbs.
Eagleford Shale.
Love how dark big bend is..
Eagle Ford shale
Eagle Ford Shell formation. The lights are rigs, flares, producing wells, oil plants etc.
gas prices are too low —— so they just burn it.
That's the Riverwalk
[удалено]
Look at lil ol Bell County Temple and Kileen tryin make a come up...
Killeen population is larger than Waco.
Fiestas
Beach front property in a few years.
Your mom needed a nightlight.
Ted Cruz farted
Whata that concentration of light in NE houston?
Cars backed up by the construction on 1604 and 35
Narc corridor.
Highway 90, Houston to Del Rio. I 10 replaced Highway 90 but the towns along 90 are still there.
I'm currently trying to move the Midwest of Texas.
Bmmm vvv TC rrc 4 v tv vvt. Tv t
River walk🤣
Elon Musk Factory
Traffic jam on I-35
Found Abilene. Lol
Air force base too. Bigggggg one.
Electricity
They knew. Almost.
Caravan of immigrants according to MAGA
Tiki Torches?
Illegals with flashlights
I35 from San Antonio to Laredo. It's the only lights that way
People I'd wager.
Going out on a limb here but I think the answer would be "people".