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by cucumber3732842 7 days ago
>What you end up with to get there is lots of propane and butane, which is used as a fuel gas, but most of that ends up going up the flare stack because there's so much of it. We won't stop doing this while we still use plastics and fertiliser.

The amount of gas flared globally adds up to little over 1% of global energy production. I know that doesn't sound like much but we're talking like terawatts. It truly is a mind boggling amount of energy that gets wasted because we simply can't get it to users cheap enough.
2 comments
rob74 7 days ago
If only all (or almost all) of it was flared! Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, and unfortunately there is still a lot of it escaping from oil installations unflared (https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/potential-emi...).
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ErroneousBosh 7 days ago
It's a pain in the arse to run vehicles on methane (CNG) because it has to be stored at around 250 bar (or, 3600psi in Old People Units), and it's really not very energy-dense so you need a lot of it.

Again though flaring it off in a gas turbine to generate electricity and heat would be ultimately less harmful than just letting it out into the air.

By contrast the tank in an LPG vehicle is at around 8 bar, not a hell of a lot more than the pressure in a truck's tyres. On my old Range Rover the LPG tank is considerably less spicy than the air suspension tank at 15 bar, which is getting into "this can injure you" territory.

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rob74 7 days ago
That reminds me of the buses with huge CNG tanks on the roof that were driving around in Romania when I was younger: https://newsweek-ro.translate.goog/auto/foto-povestea-autove...

Of course, Romania had oil too, but it was exporting most of it, and there was a lot of natural gas left over.

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ErroneousBosh 7 days ago
> because we simply can't get it to users cheap enough.

Or we can't get it clean enough to use as say cooking gas or aerosol propellant.

Stick it in cars, they'll burn any old shite and emit water and carbon dioxide - two terrible greenhouse gases, for sure, but you'll extract useful work from it instead of literally just heating the atmosphere for the fun of it.

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