Emissions associated with oil and gas production are a significant source of greenhouse gases, according to a new study by Stanford University. The study, published in Science journal, revealed that burning of unwanted gas associated with oil production – or else known as flaring – remains the most carbon-intensive part of producing oil.
Namely, Adam Brandt, assistant professor of energy resources engineering in the School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences at Stanford, and his colleagues performed a first global analysis comparing emissions associated with oil production techniques, marking a step toward developing policies that could reduce those emissions.
I think setting the expectation that the gas will be managed properly is the role of the regulatory environment. There are some efforts underway to try to tackle this – the World Bank has a big effort called the Global Gas Flaring Reduction Partnership, where companies have banded together to try to set flaring targets, so hopefully this will start to decline,
…notes Dr. Brandt.
The analysis ranks countries by emission levels, using even country-level average satellite data collected by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Scientists there have developed ways to estimate the amount of gas flared using the brightness of the flare as seen from space. It’s essentially an eye in the sky. For instance, Russia won’t say how much they are flaring, but we can see it from the satellite.
The study showed that Canadian flaring has reduced over the last years, which is attributed to regulations. In particular, Canada does not allow flaring above a certain amount and , if flaring goes above a permitted level, offshore fields are required to shut down until they handle the gas. This can be done by reinjecting it back into the ground, converting it to liquefied natural gas or installing gas pipelines to get the gas to customers., explains Dr. Brandt.
Canadian flaring has dropped significantly, and these regulations prove that you can manage flaring and require that people do something productive with the gas or put it back underground. Really, the challenge with flaring is there needs to be a policy or a regulatory apparatus to say, ‘Burning gas with no purpose isn’t allowed; put it back in the ground or find something useful to do with it.’
With this respect, Dr. Brandt highlights that a lot of the projects with flaring are in countries where environmental issues are poorly regulated. As such, he suggests:
It’s hard to wait on developing countries without large budgets or sophisticated regulatory capacity to put flaring rules into place. Instead of waiting for that to happen, we might expect the international oil companies work to solve the problems themselves by applying best practices from places were regulations have already solved the problem. For example, companies in Nigeria have increased gas reinjection and developed LNG projects to get the gas to markets. In the coming decades, we are going to be using a lot of oil and gas. It’s inevitable. Taking best practices and applying them in places that are not as well regulated right now – but hopefully will be – can allow improvements in one region to benefit another region.
The work was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Aramco Services Co., Ford Motor Co., the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Hewlett Foundation, the ClimateWorks Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
