Should this gas be trucked, or burned?
Oil wells in West and South Texas also produce natural gas. Where no pipeline can take it, producers often flare it (burn it on site) and earn nothing. A virtual pipeline puts that gas on trucks instead (compressed as CNG or chilled to liquid LNG) and sells it somewhere it is wanted. This page works out, for 18 real flares spotted by satellite, whether that trip pays, using only public data.
The short answer
How to use it, in 3 steps
- Open Overview to see every site's answer at today's prices.
- Ask “what if?” Drag any slider at the top of the page. Every chart updates, and each input you change is marked changed. Reset to today undoes it.
- Dig deeper. Economics shows where each dollar goes for one site; Sensitivity shows which assumptions could change the answer.
Try a question
Reading the charts
- Blue = selling the gas as fuel to a nearby customer
- Orange = selling it into a pipeline hub
- The dotted Flaring = $0 line is the alternative: burning earns nothing. Above it beats flaring.
- ✓Trucking beats flaring ✗Flaring is better
- estimate an assumption with no public figure
- PB- sites are in the Permian Basin (West Texas / New Mexico), EF- in the Eagle Ford (South Texas)
Words you will see
Every site: sell as fuel vs sell into a pipeline
$ per MMBtu the producer keeps, by site. Bars above the dotted line beat flaring.
Where the gas is
Click a site to see its route to the nearest hub. Squares are pipeline hubs.
Site scorecard
Best option for each site under the inputs above.
How to read this page. Pick a Site at the top. Each money walk reads left to right: the first bar is the selling price, each red step is a cost, and the last bar is what the producer keeps. Below that: how distance changes the answer, why fuel is worth more than pipeline gas, and how the answer has moved since 2021.
Selling as fuel: where each $ goes
Selling into a pipeline: where each $ goes
How far can you haul?
Netback vs one-way miles. Where a line crosses the dotted line is its break-even distance.
Why fuel sales win
What one MMBtu is worth, weekly since 2021 (EIA): as a diesel replacement vs as pipeline gas.
Has it ever paid?
Best netback by market, weekly average across sites, at actual historical prices and today's cost assumptions.
CNG or LNG?
LNG carries more per truck but liquefying it is expensive, so it only wins on long hauls.
How to read this page. Each row is an assumption we can't know exactly. Its bars show how far the producer's take would move if that assumption sat at the low or high end of its plausible range, with everything else at today's base case. Long bars matter; short ones don't. No single assumption changes any site's answer.
What moves the fuel-sale netback?
What moves the pipeline netback?
How much would have to change?
Break-even points for each site under the inputs above.
Where the numbers come from
- Gas & diesel prices: U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) API: Henry Hub daily spot, Gulf Coast diesel weekly.
- Flare sites: World Bank / NOAA VIIRS satellite flare volumes (2012–2025), inside EIA basin outlines. Sites that flared in each of 2023–25.
- Driving routes: OSRM on OpenStreetMap road data.
- Costs: World Bank GGFR studies, ATRI trucking costs, DOE fuel properties, Hexagon & OEG container specs, BLS CPI.
How it's built
A PostgreSQL star schema fed by tested Python ingestion with data-quality checks; all netback logic is SQL views. This page is a static snapshot: it carries the SQL's outputs, and redoes only the final arithmetic for your what-ifs, checked against the SQL by automated tests. Read the code and write-ups ↗
Assumptions
Every input that isn't an observed price, in 2025 dollars. estimate = no public figure exists.
Data-quality checks
Latest pipeline run.