I've spent time at a lot of wellsites. You get out there, you see what the operation actually looks like beyond the spreadsheets and quarterly reports. And what strikes me most is how openly wasteful the whole thing is. Nobody hides it. It's just the way it works.
You've got your frac fleet on location. Multiple diesel generators running continuously. Backup generators sitting there. All of them burning fuel. Day in, day out. It's loud, it's dirty, and it costs a fortune. And while those generators are running, right next to them is gas coming out of the well that's being vented or flared because there's no way to use it.
The scale of this is what caught my attention. One conversation with a fleet operator put the numbers in front of me. 175 active frac fleets in the United States. Each one burning 5 to 5.5 million gallons of diesel per year. That's not a typo. Per year. Per fleet.
The math is simple and it's brutal
Multiply that out. 5.2 million gallons per frac fleet. Current diesel prices sitting around $3 a gallon on average. That's $15.6 million in annual fuel costs per fleet just in direct diesel consumption. Divide that across the 175 active fleets in the U.S. and you're at nearly $2.7 billion a year in diesel for frac operations alone.
But here's what people actually care about: the per-site number. A single wellsite operation running one frac fleet for a year burns through diesel at a rate that costs about $240,000 annually. That's not capex. That's just burning fuel.
For a typical operator managing multiple wellsites, that's millions of dollars a year in a line item that nobody can really do anything about. It's the cost of doing business. The generators have to run. The fuel gets bought. The invoices get paid.
Flaring is the bigger story anyway
The diesel is expensive, but the flaring is wasteful at a different level. 151 billion cubic meters of natural gas flared globally in 2024. Let me repeat that. Billion. Cubic. Meters. Gas that came out of the ground, that has value, that could be used, just getting burned off because there's no infrastructure to capture it.
In the U.S. oil fields, a lot of that gas is "stranded" or "associated" gas. It comes up with the oil. You can't leave it downhole. And if you don't have a pipeline or processing facility, you flare it. It's been the standard play for decades.
But the EPA isn't letting that slide anymore. New methane rules took effect that require an 80% reduction in methane emissions from oil and gas operations. Methane from flaring is a big part of that target. Operators have to figure out how to capture it, use it, or reduce it. There's no more "it's just how we do it" in this business.
So you've got a scenario where frac operators are burning diesel at $240K per year per site while simultaneously flaring gas that could power those same generators. It's the definition of having your solution sitting right there and ignoring it.
The regulatory pressure is real
The EPA's methane rules aren't suggestions. They come with penalties. States are implementing them. Companies that don't comply are facing fines and operational shutdowns. This isn't a compliance checkbox anymore. It's a business imperative.
And it's not just the U.S. Canada's got rules. Europe's got rules. International lenders won't finance projects that don't have a methane mitigation strategy. The window for ignoring this closed a while ago.
Operators know it. They're scrambling to figure out how to flip the script from "how do we flare less" to "how do we use what we're already producing."
Multi-fuel generation changes the equation
Here's where it gets interesting. What if you could take the gas that's currently being flared, run it through a compact, efficient generator, and power your entire frac fleet? You eliminate the diesel costs. You solve the flaring problem. You hit the EPA's methane targets. And you're actually doing something productive with a resource that's currently getting wasted.
The technical barrier used to be real. Frac equipment is tough on generators. Vibration, dust, aggressive duty cycles. Traditional gensets didn't hold up. And moving a heavy generator from site to site added costs and logistics headaches.
But compact multi-fuel generators change that equation entirely. You get the reliability you need for frac duty. You get the flexibility to run on whatever fuel is available at the site. And you get it in a form factor that actually deploys and redeploys reasonably.
This is why we built the GX230
I started thinking about what a frac operator actually needs. They need power. They need it to be reliable. They need it to work with whatever fuel is available on site. And they need to be able to move it from wellsite to wellsite without it becoming a project in itself.
The GX230 is a 200 kW multi-fuel generator designed for exactly this kind of duty. It runs on natural gas, propane, hydrogen, or biogas. Drop it on a wellsite where you're flaring gas, connect it to the flare recovery system, and you've got instant power for your frac operation without buying a single gallon of diesel.
It's 15 square feet. 700 kg. Compact enough to fit on location without taking up the whole site. It's grid-parallel, which means if you do have grid power available, it integrates seamlessly with it. And it deploys in days, not months of engineering and setup.
Most importantly, it runs at 69 dBA. That's quieter than a frac fleet operator expects, which means you can actually have conversations around it. It's not some loud industrial noise problem.
At $240K in annual diesel costs per wellsite, the economics work out fast. You capture the flared gas. You run the generator on that gas. You eliminate the diesel. The system pays for itself in under a year on fuel savings alone. And you're hitting the EPA's methane targets in the process.
For operators managing multiple sites, this scales. You deploy the GX230 at your highest-value locations first. You see the fuel savings, the flare reduction, the operational efficiency. Then you expand to more sites. It's not a bet-the-company infrastructure project. It's a site-by-site upgrade that works immediately.
We're already talking to operators about this. The interest is real. They know the diesel spend is unsustainable. They know flaring is becoming a liability. They're looking for a practical way to do something about both at the same time. That's exactly what the GX230 is built for. If you're managing frac operations and want to cut costs while hitting your methane targets, let's talk.