It's a Gas

Okay, I didn't look this information up, but I have gleaned it from things like newspaper accounts over the years. Natural gas is kind of a by-product of crude oil production. When they drill for oil, they frequently encounter pockets of natural gas along the way. There is more demand for oil than for gas, so sometimes they just flare the gas off to get rid of it. If an oil well is in production long enough, and the nearest gas market is close enough, they will eventually build a gas pipeline, but they often want the oil immediately and are in no hurry to get the gas out.

In rural areas like the one in which I live, everybody who can get it prefers natural gas to propane because propane is more expensive and you need this big tank in your yard, which has to be filled periodically with a truck. I think that propane is actually made from natural gas, but it's more expensive because of the cost of processing and transporting it. The thing is that natural gas is not available in many areas because there are no pipes to carry it to people's houses. They won't lay the pipes unless there are enough customers per mile to justify it economically so, the less population density you have on your road, the less likely that you will have access to natural gas.

It used to be the same way with electricity, until the Rural Electrification Administration was founded, some time in the 1930s. What they do is make low interest long term construction loans to regional electric cooperatives, which are similar to electric companies except that they are non-profit and actually owned by their customers, something like credit unions. Originally, electric co-ops went into the rural areas where the commercial outfits didn't want to go but, now that the population has increased, the commercial guys would love to get their hands on the co-ops' territories, but they can't because the co-ops have exclusive rights to them.

Our local electric co-op branched out into the natural gas business some time ago, intending to serve the neighborhoods that don't already have gas piped to them. The local commercial gas company fought them in court for years, on the basis that natural gas delivery was not in the original charter of electric co-op. The co-op said, "Okay, then you do it." The gas company didn't want to do it, but they didn't want anybody else to do it either. (These are the kind of guys who give capitalism a bad name.)  Eventually, the courts ruled in favor of the co-ops, and they started piping gas to neighborhoods that didn't already have it.

One such neighborhood was east of Cheboygan along the U.S. 23 corridor. There were plenty of customers there, but the commercial guys didn't want to go to them, and the co-op did. The problem was that the commercial guys owned the rights to Highway 23 in town, and they wouldn't sell the co-op an easement, effectively blocking them. What the co-op did was lay a pipe down the road I live on, which dead ends in the swamp. It's a section line road, which means it was originally platted, but never developed beyond my property. They pushed through the swamp a mile or so until they came out to another local road that connected to Highway 23 beyond the commercial guys' territory. So the swamp dwellers on those two dead end gravel roads now have natural gas because they live along the pipeline that was originally intended to serve the folks along 23. The last place we lived in was on a busy paved road. There was gas to the north of us, and gas to the south of us, maybe a mile both ways, but the gas company refused to lay pipe along our road and connect the two. There were certainly more houses along that road than the one I live on now but, last I heard, they still don't have natural gas, and I do. Too bad for them!