We're seeing a lot of these crypo-meets-energy stories lately and, while I'm all for stopping the horrible waste and gas flaring that goes on in our country (I'

We're seeing a lot of these crypo-meets-energy stories lately and, while I'm all for stopping the horrible waste and gas flaring that goes on in our country (I'm in Texas), this is a really a PR spin story. The fact of the matter is that natural gas and methane are available in hundreds of places which appear remotely and often spontaneously during drilling and production. The reason that Exxon and others have not captured and sold that gas is that they did not want to. There have never been any technical limitations on capturing or storing the volumes of combustible gas released every day in our energy industry. The limitation has been that it wasn't viewed as profitable enough. Burning that gas on site and using it to power crypo mining is the low-hanging fruit of utilizing wasted gas. It could just as easily be converted to electricity using on-site fuel cells to create a charging station for electric cars, for example. It doesn't take a petroleum scientist (or a crypto engineer) to figure out that if burnable gas is coming out of the ground, that gas can be captured, stored, sold to someone, and later burned as electricity or heat. Most children can figure that out, so this is not a big "advance" for the petroleum business. I say this as a supporter of our use of fossil fuels which are critical to maintaining the standard of life we've come to enjoy. I recommend The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels for background on that viewpoint. But there is much more the industry can do to stop throwing away combustible fuel. The war in Ukraine with energy at its centerpoint is the kind of issue that it will take for US energy companies to focus on maximizing the utilization of the resources we already have and can already exploit in the US. Like other entrenched industries (auto, media), oil companies are recalcitrant to consider or invest a future where the key means of production differ from the ones in which they've sunk costs.