You, sir, have not experienced home ownership in rural America. There is no natural gas within about an hour's drive of our home but probably 90% or more of the homes around us have one or more propane tanks. Our property has two homes on it (we live in one, the other is a guest house). There are two 500-gallon above-ground propane tanks sitting about 25' from one of those homes (the legal minimum), feeding that building and the nearby backup generator. But there's also a pipe running underground behind that closest building, then under the lawn of the other building, to feed main building #2. It must be 100 feet in length, and figuring out its exact path was a big headache after we purchased the property four years ago and installed an underground electric line to from the generator to the guest house. That's likely the type of line the OP is referencing, and they're very common in our part of the world. A truck pulls up and refills the tanks as needed, but where we live, that truck may need to wait a month or more to get in here if we have a major ice storm, which explains the big tanks.
BTW, we also built an exercise studio across the driveway from our house last year, which is where I installed my off grid solar. To heat it, we went with a propane direct-vent wall furnace (Rinnai), which is possibly the single most common heating appliance I see in our area. It's only 50-70 feet from those big propane tanks, but neither we nor the propane supplier wanted to run a line to it because we would have needed to cross the main electric line from the utility, and no one wanted to tackle that trenching job. So, in went two 120-gallon "fat boy" tanks, which can sit right beside the building (in a wife-approved location out behind it, actually). And when I build my new office later this year, after a lot of internal debate about how to heat it, what will I install? Yep - more propane, with yet another tank.
I've been trying like a madman to figure out how to reasonably create enough solar to power AND HEAT a new home we're building (7 miles from this property), without using propane or oil. Much harder than you'd think if you want to avoid the grid and don't wish to heat with wood. Propane here is a way of life come winter.