Thank you for explaining the situation of it. I did not think of damaged wells and how those could be an issue while trying to reuse them.
I wrote a post on the topic a month ago, I have been seeing it come up every few years in discussion.
https://peakd.com/bitcoin/@solominer/using-old-natural-gas-wells-to-power-cryptocurrency-miners
Another thing mentioned in the post I go into a little bit is recapturing the flare gas to run generators as well, that way the flare gas is put to use when it leaves the wells.
flare gas is easier, because you have already got it out of the ground and you are flaring it because there is no infrastructure of gas pipelines to transport it. Pipelines are expensive and requires complicated permitting and therefore politically challenged.
Two problems here, both solvable:
Collect the flare gas with a gas pipeline
Transport all that gas to a gas turbine
As you can see both are investment heavy before you even produce a single kilowatt of electricity. The economics of this at any kind of small project scale is negative. So unless you like to burn a lot of cash, there is no point of doing this.
Great post! Sorry I missed it. I saw that you are talking about modular generators. The cost structure of those thing is difficult to scale and you will run into operational issues quickly.
You wrote this above in your post, and this is a key challenge. Just writing this sentence is probably an understatement. Currently in the US, this is the biggest challenge we face. Permitting, and there are numerous layers, is extremely complicated and costly. The politics of the whole situation is mind boggling to say the least!