I visited an oil field in West Texas last month. Walked out to the wellsite at dawn. The first thing I noticed wasn't the drilling rig. It was the flare stack. A giant metal tower with a bright flame burning at the top, 24 hours a day, in what looked like controlled fire.
I asked the site supervisor what was burning. He said, "That's associated gas. It comes up with the oil. We don't have a pipeline, so we burn it off." Then he pointed to the diesel generator running at full capacity right next to the flare, powering the site operations.
He watched my face and just nodded. He already knew it made no sense.
The scale of waste is incomprehensible
In 2024, global oil and gas operations flared 151 billion cubic meters of associated gas. That's not leakage. That's not accident. That's intentional burning because there's no economic way to capture or transport it.
Associated gas is what comes up with the oil. In places where there's no pipeline network, no processing infrastructure, or no market to sell it to, operators burn it. They literally light it on fire and let it burn day and night. It's legal in most places. It's accepted practice in the industry. And it's staggering in scale.
To put 151 billion cubic meters in perspective, that's enough natural gas to heat a million American homes for a year. It's energy that's been created by geological processes over millions of years, brought to the surface by expensive drilling operations, and then burned with zero economic return.
And we're powering the site with diesel
Here's what really got me. The wellsite needs electricity. For pumping equipment, compressors, instrumentation, lighting, everything. So they run a diesel generator on site. Large diesel generator. Burning expensive fuel, creating emissions, making noise, requiring fuel deliveries, needing maintenance.
Meanwhile, the gas that's rising out of the ground is literally being burned in the flare stack fifty feet away.
The math is obvious to anyone who looks at it. You've got free fuel coming out of the ground. You've got power demand on site. You've got equipment that can turn one into the other. But the infrastructure and economics aren't set up to connect them. So both operate independently, wasting money and energy.
The oil is profitable. The gas is waste. The solution sits right on the wellsite, undeployed.
The ROI calculation is brutal for operators
I worked through the numbers with several operators. The lifecycle cost analysis is compelling. A wellsite that's running diesel generators to power its operations could run those same generators on captured stranded gas. The gas is free. It's already there. The only cost is capturing it and routing it to the generator.
Most mid-size wellsites operate continuously. That's thousands of hours per year of generator runtime. At current diesel prices, you're looking at significant annual fuel costs. If you could offset that with gas that's currently being flared, the math works fast.
Our analysis shows a typical stranded gas deployment saves around $638,000 per unit over the equipment lifecycle. That's a real number. That comes from looking at actual flare rates, actual generator run times, actual diesel prices. Not theoretical. Actual.
But here's where it gets complicated. Capturing and processing associated gas requires equipment investment. It requires environmental permits. It requires infrastructure. Most small and mid-size operators don't have the capital or expertise to build that infrastructure. So they keep burning the gas and buying diesel.
Stranded gas deployment is the answer
Forward-thinking operators are starting to think about this differently. Instead of running diesel generators to power the site, they're deploying equipment that can run directly on the gas that's being flared. They capture the gas stream, condition it slightly if needed, and feed it into a generator that's designed to run on natural gas, propane, or biogas.
The generator runs continuously on fuel that's free and abundant on site. The diesel deliveries stop. The environmental impact flips from negative to positive. And the financial case becomes obvious.
The best units can handle variable gas composition because not all associated gas is pure methane. Some of it has heavier hydrocarbons, some has sulfur compounds. The equipment needs to work reliably and handle variations in composition. It needs to start and stop safely. It needs to handle the pressure variations that come from real-world wellsite conditions.
This is why we built Immedia Power
I got tired of visiting wellsites where money was literally burning in a flare stack while diesel generators ran on the next lot over. So we built the GX230 to solve this exact problem.
The GX230 is a 200 kilowatt generator that runs on natural gas, propane, hydrogen, or biogas. For a stranded gas site, it means you take the gas that's coming up with your oil, feed it directly into the generator, and eliminate your diesel consumption. No capital-intensive gas processing. No complex infrastructure. Just clean fuel to power, immediately available.
It fits in 15 square feet. 700 kilograms. It deploys in days. No utility approval needed. No interconnection studies or years of waiting. You install it on site, connect your gas stream, and it runs. It runs at 69 decibels, so it's quiet enough for industrial sites without creating environmental issues. And because it's software-managed, you can monitor and control it remotely, even if the wellsite is in the middle of nowhere.
For a typical stranded gas operation, the economics break in months, not years. You stop burning the gas, you stop buying diesel, and you cut your site emissions by switching to on-site power generation. The flare shuts down. The diesel generator gets retired. One piece of equipment, multi-fuel, does the job of both.
We're already deploying GX230 units at stranded gas sites across the U.S. If your wellsite is flaring gas while running diesel, get in touch. This is exactly the problem we built Immedia Power to solve.