There are a lot of nuances to assign the gas a value. Our electricity is apparently in the 5-6 cents per kWh range. I did the math recently and running a generator on site can cut that in half. But then you're in the business of running a fleet of hundreds of generators. Is it cheaper per kWh? Yes. But then factor in the cost of mechanics, techs, maintenance, etc. and that bring it close to even. You've also locked yourself into a bad spot if the price of natural gas spikes 3x like it did in summer 2022 with the Russia/Ukraine war and all of a sudden your self-generated electricity is far more expensive than utility and you can't sell any of your gas because you never build the gathering lines to get it to a pipeline.
If you're self-generating from gas you'd otherwise just release to the air, your generation costs aren't changing from the spike in markets you're not even participating in. You're not buying the gas, you're getting it directly from the ground.
If you have a water well on site, does a drought far away change the cost for you to get water from the ground? One could argue you're not realizing the gains in the market by bringing your water to sale and losing out on opportunity, but those are theoretical dollars you're losing. Your actual costs stayed the same.
Most companies have a pot of money they can put across multiple projects and will typically put that money towards projects that are going to profit the most. If you have a well near a major transmission pipeline, that's where you're going to invest most of your time and effort.
Self-generating still means your turning power over to the market, and in long runs of sunny/windy days power prices may go negative for some amount of time.
It's a lot of risk, hence why the oil/gas industry has lots of booms and busts.
> You've also locked yourself into a bad spot if the price of natural gas spikes 3x like it did in summer 2022 with the Russia/Ukraine war and all of a sudden your self-generated electricity is far more expensive than utility and you can't sell any of your gas because you never build the gathering lines to get it to a pipeline.
The war in Ukraine spiking natural gas prices aren't increasing your costs if you're using waste gas. Your costs are the same regardless of whatever the global market of gas prices are, because you're not selling this gas on the market nor are you buying from the market. And for the vast majority of markets the war led to utility rates increasing, not decreasing, so chances are your self-generation rate was less than the grid not more.
> Self-generating still means your turning power over to the market
That's an assumption, but depending on the setup it might be true or it might not be true. One could self generate just for their own local usage and not be tied to the grid.
I agree with the idea of it potentially not being competitive with renewables, once again you're talking potential lost opportunity when talking about renewables coming in cheaper. But the fact renewables came in cheaper some days doesn't make your costs increase, it just makes it less competitive than the grid power. The grid going negative doesn't change your costs if you're not connected to the grid, it just means you're spending more than you potentially needed to. And I agree its this risk of the price of electricity going lower than the costs of actually gathering and burning this gas for electricity that leads to it being flared and vented instead of put to something useful.
But still, from the perspective of self-generation your costs aren't changing from grid conditions. Say it costs you like $0.05/kWh to self generate with the waste gas. The grid goes down to only $0.02/kWh. Did your costs to generate go up? No, its still $0.05/kWh. Sure, you're overpaying by $0.03/kWh compared to just using the grid power but your costs were still the same.
