Why are we still flaring gas?

Start with why flaring is a defensible practice at all, because the episode only makes sense once that is clear. Natural gas is roughly 90% methane, and methane is about 80 times more damaging to the climate than carbon dioxide over 20 years and about 30 times over 100. Burning it converts the methane to carbon dioxide and cuts that impact sharply. The alternative to flaring is not capturing the gas, it is venting it, which is worse for the climate and also an explosion and health hazard for workers and nearby communities. So flaring is the better of two bad options, and that is why it survives as an accepted industry practice rather than being treated as an accident.

The scale is what makes it indefensible anyway. Roughly 150 billion cubic meters were flared in the most recent year of World Bank data, more than Norway produced, and Norway is the eighth-largest gas producer in the world. The line has been essentially flat since 2010, through the World Bank’s Zero Routine Flaring initiative, the Global Methane Pledge and the Oil and Gas Decarbonization Charter, all of which point at zero routine flaring by 2030. Flaring intensity, meaning gas flared per unit of oil produced, has improved, but only marginally. And the emissions figure of roughly 500 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent is not purely carbon dioxide, because no flare achieves complete combustion. The IEA puts global flare combustion efficiency near 92%, well below the 98% the industry tends to cite, because flares operate in high winds, go unlit after upsets, and are often poorly monitored. A meaningful slice of flaring emissions is therefore raw methane, which is precisely the thing flaring exists to prevent.

Kann spends the middle of the episode running through the obvious fixes and expecting one of them to work, and the interesting part is that Bredariol agrees the economics are often favorable and still explains why nothing happens. Pipelines are the leading answer, and most of the 8,000-plus flaring sites worldwide could probably connect to one, often by adding 10 or 20 kilometers of line or striking a deal with whoever owns the existing trunk. But Permian wells co-produce small volumes of gas that decline fast, so the operator is being asked to build durable infrastructure for a short-lived stream. Using the gas on site to displace diesel generation should be free money, except the gas often needs cleaning first to strip carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide and liquids. Reinjection is better than it sounds because it can lift oil recovery later, but only in reservoirs whose pressure and maturity allow it. Small-scale compressed or liquefied natural gas needs roads or waterways, gas-to-liquids and small-scale methanol cost far more, and going offshore takes nearly all of it off the table. The honest answer Bredariol gives is that operators are generally aware flaring is harmful and simply have better places to put capital: using the gas may be economical, but not to that extent. In some cases, particularly the long tail of small flares, it is genuinely not economical at all.

That reframing changes what the United States’ presence on the list of worst offenders means. Kann’s instinct is that flaring concentrates where regulation is weak, and the nine countries that dominate it do include Russia, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Algeria, Libya, Nigeria and Mexico. But the United States is on that list too, and Bredariol separates volume from intensity to explain it: on intensity the US is a relatively good performer, though not among the best, and it appears on the list because it is the largest oil and gas producer. His second correction is that flaring is not reliably a small-operator, low-infrastructure phenomenon. US flaring rose about 20% in a year driven mostly by the Permian, a mature basin with plenty of infrastructure, where operations are nonetheless dispersed enough that an individual company without relationships with its neighbors may have no practical route to a pipeline. Which is what makes his closing argument about regulation follow rather than being a reflex. Norway has prohibited routine flaring since about 1971 and its industry functions normally, and Nigeria cut flaring from about 20 billion cubic meters a year in 2000 to about six through a combination of regulation, fiscal incentives, infrastructure investment and LNG export capacity. The shove works where it has been tried.