Flammables are used to lighten the skies in many oil- and gas-producing regions. According to oil and gas companies, flares can burn off 98% of natural gas escaping. However, three U.S. oil fields have shown that efficiency is high. Only around 91 per centIn the Sept. 30 Science Report Science. It would take almost 3,000,000 cars to make up the difference.
The main natural gas escaping from the atmosphere is methane. Although this greenhouse gas is only able to linger in the atmosphere for nine to ten years, its warming potential can be 80 times greater than that of carbon dioxide. So oil and gas companies light flares — burning the methane to produce less-potent carbon dioxide and water. Both the U.S. government and the industry assumed that these flares were 98 percent efficient. But previous studies said This might seem a bit optimistic.Genevieve Plant, an atmosphere scientist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, agrees.SN: 4/22/20).
Plant and her coworkers flew planes to collect air samples over more than 300 flares in North Dakota’s Bakken Basin and Texas’s Permian, Eagle Ford and Texas basins. These areas account for more that 80 percent of all flaring in the United States. Five times more methane was found in the samples than originally thought.
While the reduction in efficiency from 98 to 91% might not seem significant, it has large effects, according to Dan Cusworth of the University of Arizona, Tucson. He was not part of this study. “Any percentage that is in the methane phase instead of CO2 phase is substantially more problematic.”
Half of the difference is due to flares that aren’t burning. “We expected that flares might show a range of efficiencies, but we did not expect to see so many unlit flares,” Plant says. Between 3 and 5 percent of flares weren’t working at all. If the fires were lit and the efficiency was 98 percent, it could remove about 13 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Light ‘em up.
