So this is a pretty cool discovery, since for the most part when drilling for oil, the natural gas (often contaminated underground with sulfur compounds) is just burned off as a waste product, which is an enormous waste of energy as a gas flare at the well site, on the order of 1.4E11 cubic meters is "flared" off annually, which is nearly 25% of the total natural gas consumption in the US! This is an insane waste, and extremely ironic given the new love of fracking to get natural gas out of the shale. Flaring is also an important safety measure to prevent over pressurization of systems. But one can see immediately there is a potential to capture a significant amount of energy from these flares, which are generally considered too difficult too re-compress or liquefy for transport due to location, cost, infrastructure, available markets, etc. Most flaring (33%) occurs in Russian(+Kazakhstan), then Africa (18%) then the middle east (18%) and then North+South America (8%). This new technology would allow the flare gas to be cracked onsite, and stored or piped as pure hydrogen (with contaminants = cheaper) instead of natural gas, or more importantly converted directly to electricity at the site via a fuel cell or combustion with this new technology, but with no C02 emissions (from the Hydrogen, don't know what you do with the cracked contaminant gases, put them in the ground again?), and then transported via the electrical grid, reducing the cost associated with physical transport infrastructure and liquification of the LNG (or hydrogen). Pipeline gas is about $3.73 per 1000 cubic feet and LNG is $8.65 per 1000 cubic feet (about 37 cubic meters), which contains about 35 MJ/cubic meter (on average), so our 1.4E11 cubic meters could yield (at 50% C.E.) 2.45E12 MJ/year or 6.8E11 kw-hrs of electrical energy over the year sold at $.10 / kw-hr is $68 billion from consumers/year, so the economics seem to make sense (in the US of course), assuming my math is correct. :-)

References:

http://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/ng_pri_sum_dcu_nus_m.htm

http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2004/JessicaYan.shtml

http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTOGMC/EXTGGFR/0,,menuPK:578075~pagePK:64168427~piPK:64168435~theSitePK:578069,00.html

http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTGGFR/Resources/GGFR_NewBrochure%28Oct2011%29.pdf

Thanks Professor Kirk.