According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), in 2024:
- *Texas natural gas production:* 27.5 billion cubic feet per day. - *Texas natural gas consumption:* 14.6 billion cubic feet per day.
So Texas produces nearly twice as much natural gas as it consumes domestically.
Natural gas contains approximately 1,025 BTU per cubic foot. Assuming 50% efficiency in a natural gas power plant, and 1 kWh equals 3,412 BTU.
27.5 − 14.6 = *12.9 billion cubic feet per day.*
12.9 billion × 1,025 BTU × 50% efficiency ÷ 3,412 BTU/kWh ÷ 24 hours = *approximately 80.7 GW of continuous electrical generation.*
That's the equivalent of more than EIGHT 10-GW AI computing campuses operating around the clock.
Lastly, a significant amount of natural gas is produced alongside crude oil. When producers can't economically capture or transport that gas, some of it is burned off through a process called flaring. Those flames you sometimes see at oil and gas facilities are an example, although refinery flares also serve important safety functions.
Seems like you just like to say snarky things about Elon, but can't be asked to do any actual math.
[–] vel0city 2 days ago
[–] burnerRhodov3 2 days ago
420.8 GW is alot of compute... like an ungodly amount. A vera rubin rack is like 220KW.. so 1.9m racks. a rack is 72 GPU's per rack so 420.8GW of power is 137.7M GPU's. So lets say about 60% of the power goes to infra, we get 55.08M GPU's. So, with each GPU costing around 55k, that gives us a final cost of compute for the 420GW is 3.0294 trillion.
Obviously that is not real... Eithier double booked, or fake corps making a bunch of requests from thousand different vectors to resell access.
Also, companies like Base are making a killing off taking all the excess energy generated by wind at Night and selling it back to the grid.
So in final, we can support around a $6T AI buildout in Texas just on our exported Natural Gas alone before we really need to start expanding LNG supply.
[–] vel0city 2 days ago
https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2026/07/29/ERCOT-Senate-Jul...
And yeah, supposedly it's over $1T in computer capacity allegedly planned to be built.
> just on our exported Natural Gas alone before we really need to start expanding LNG supply.
That's natural gas which already has a buyer though. We're now adding a buyer who isn't batting an eye at spending over a trillion dollars. What price of natural gas do they stop buying at? What price will the people of Texas, surrounding states, and our international customers pay for gas until we can't afford it and freeze?
So yeah, if we do build out anything close to this I hope we manage to increase energy capacity similarly. Because I doubt I can spend as much to heat my home as these hyperscalers can spend to power their chips.
That's kind of the whole point of my "sucks the natural gas pipes dry". I'm not saying the gas pressure of the line going to my house is literally going to zero, but if it's so expensive I can't afford for it to flow it might as well be.
Also, your number of 72 GPUs per rack is a dated figure. They're targeting >500 per rack these days. That's also assuming GPUs. What's the same math on TPUs?
[–] burnerRhodov3 2 days ago
Ahhhhh, Makes sense now. Page 7 of your slideshow, Key Takeaway: Solar and Energy Storage account for approximately 72% of the amount of generation seeking interconnection in the ERCOT grid.
Remember i mentioned Base earlier? Those interconnects are for peps selling or arbing in energy. Not to pull energy out of it.
[–] vel0city 2 days ago
All I'm certain of is all this new demand willing to pay any price means things will be more expensive just to try and not melt or freeze in the Texas weather.
FWIW I'm far from an AI detractor. But we need to make sure we're putting these costs where they belong, and some of these plans do seem insane.
[–] burnerRhodov3 2 days ago
What happens when companies have more GDP than the united states? Because i though the two would be correlated since American companies, but i guess if you can sell to a global market and the government can only tax it's citizens, that's kinda the inevitable outcome.
[–] vel0city 2 days ago
These hyperscalers are issuing so much debt and investors are certain enough of returns they're upending global bond markets (among other factors, it's not just AI). Tons of large countries are having to mess with interest rates because the groups who used to buy their debt are already tossing their money at AI datacenters at a massive scale.
> JPMorgan Chase estimated in June that $4.1 trillion in AI-related debt will be issued through 2030, as data center companies and others tied to the AI boom race to build up capacity.
And once again that's just the debt. They're also all making many billions of dollars every quarter in revenue already, they're planning on that increasing rapidly, and dumping that cash into building as fast as they can.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/27/debt-hungry-data-center-comp...
So yeah, your napkin math of them spending trillions on datacenter builds you used to try and illustrate how impossible that could be...yeah...that's been the plan for a while. It's an insane number, but that's the number.
I do agree and understand we flare a lot of natural gas, waste because there's just not the economics to transfer it elsewhere. I definitely agree, it would be nice for that to be put to some economic use if we're pulling it out of the ground.
> Texas produces nearly twice as much natural gas as it consumes domestically.
And it exports that other half it doesn't consume domestically. It's not like half of what is produced just sits around forever. We've massively scaled up LNG exports. We export to surrounding states. But hey just act like we've got billions of cubic feet lying around doing nothing ready to go for datacenters.
> approximately 80.7 GW of continuous electrical generation.
Ooh wow. There's 420.8 GW of demand sitting in the ERCOT connection queue specifically for data centers today. All that "extra" and we'll cover like 20%. A good gas power plant will do better than 50%, but that's still not enough. And I imagine there will be even more datacenter demand coming soon. And that's just at the grid connection levels, not behind-the-meter generation like what we're talking about.
I've also lived through continued cost increases of natural gas in Texas. What does adding an additional 420GW of demand for just datacenters do to our rates? How much more am I going to spend to heat my home this winter? How much more will I spend on my electric bill next summer?
I've also lived through the collapse of natural gas supplies in 2021. I wonder if these datacenters will turn off their turbines or let people freeze it something similar happened again?
Seems like you make a big point about doing the math but only doing half of it. Keep going, see where it takes you.