It’s discarded today. Natural gas itself is a byproduct of drilling for oil, and there are places where, due to a lack of convenient pipelines for transporting it, huge quantities of natural gas are just burned as waste.
Edit: citation. It’s called “flaring”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_flare#Impacts_of_waste_fla...
It’s not like a safe storage, efficient, fairly clean source of energy is ever going to be worthless.