Oil industry flaring less effective than thought: Study

Three million cars’ worth of emissions could be cut by addressing inefficiency.

Read the whole story

 

[dwl-sdca]

At an oilfield in southern Louisiana, several flares were replaced by generators to power a crypto mining facility.

 

[Toastr]

At an oilfield in southern Louisiana, several flares were replaced by generators to power a crypto mining facility.

Not feasible. If it was, they could (and should) skip the crypto and just generate electricity for more productive uses.

 

[fenris_uy]

I kind of know the answer, but it always impressed me that they didn't even try to capture a part of that fire. Put a coil of water pipes around and heat some water or something. It would still be an open flame, that you don't try to control, but at least you could try to recover some energy from it.

 

[jezra]

Cutting those emissions would require some sort of infrastructure investment; which means money would be spent on something that, while good for humanity as a whole, does not increase shareholder revenue.

 

[No one you know]

I always felt that fracking for natural gas was perverse when they were flaring it at oilfields.

Edit to add: apparently they also flare at fracking sites.

 

[Recovering Academic]

The percentage consumed is the wrong way to think of it, but rather you should focus on the percentage released.

E.g., it's not 98% Vs 91% burned, it's 2% released in the expected case, and 9% released in reality.

It's not a "small difference" of a few %, it's a 350% increase in the amount of methane released over expected.

 

[skiItIfYouCan]

If you express the numbers differently it is more impressive. Going from 98% to 91% means they are not burning 9% instead of the 2% they thought: That is 350% more than they thought.

 

[Wickwick]

"While the difference between 98 percent and 91 percent doesn’t appear large, it can add up, Kort noted."

The difference there is quite large to my eye. The part that's not converted went from 2 to 9%. That's an increase of 350%. Framing numbers is an important part of technical communication and something that too many scientists and engineers just aren't very good at.

Edit: Ninja'd by two. I would expect nothing less from Arsians - well done.

 

[Wickwick]

I kind of know the answer, but it always impressed me that they didn't even try to capture a part of that fire. Put a coil of water pipes around and heat some water or something. It would still be an open flame, that you don't try to control, but at least you could try to recover some energy from it.

It's too bad methane-fueled fuel cells are so squirrely.

 

[OrvGull]

Cutting those emissions would require some sort of infrastructure investment; which means money would be spent on something that, while good for humanity as a whole, does not increase shareholder revenue.

Being able to sell the gas would definitely increase shareholder revenue, but the problem is it's really hard to build new gas pipelines. Just the permitting for it is a years-long process with no guarantee it will succeed. You can truck out oil or move it by train but the only way to economically move natural gas is with a pipeline.

 

[Recovering Academic]

Edit: Ninja'd by two. I would expect nothing less from Arsians - well done.

Haha, it came down to mere seconds!

 

[Fancy Internet Person]

I, for one, am shocked to hear the pollution industry lies about their pollution output.

 

[sep332]

I think this is great news. A smallish change to the flare pipes and presto, a huge difference.

 

[joebub]

Why burn a potentially useful fuel? “You might have a volume of natural gas, which is primarily methane, that you don’t have anything to do with. You don’t have the capacity to capture it and put it into a pipeline—it’s not economic, the pressure would exceed safety tolerances,” Kort told Ars.

This is why we need a carbon tax. The cost of emitting this gas is passed on to everyone but the oil companies. Too many carrots and not enough sticks. One BP exec had the gall to complain that tax credits were too low for carbon capture. This is the problem! We shouldn't be paying someone to clean up their own mess. It should be a tax on them to emit the carbon. Clean it up and you don't pay the tax. Instead, we let them emit for free and they can get paid even more to clean it up. It is disgusting.

 

[phat_tony]

At an oilfield in southern Louisiana, several flares were replaced by generators to power a crypto mining facility.

Not feasible. If it was, they could (and should) skip the crypto and just generate electricity for more productive uses.

This article disagrees.

The location wasn't Louisiana, but that's not relevant to the point.

EDIT - link formatting

2nd Edit -
Seriously, can someone explain why I'm being modded down?
Commenter 1 said people were using flare gas to run generators to mine crypto.
Commenter 2 said that that's "not feasible."
So I reply to commenter 2 with a link to an NBC article that says that people are doing that. People are using flare gas to run generators to mine crypto.

I know people hate crypto around here. I'm not pro crypto. I didn't say that what they're doing is a good idea. A guy got modded up a bunch for saying that doing this isn't feasible. I provided a credible link that his statement is factually incorrect.

 

[KhepryQuixote]

Injection of steam into the flare improves its burning efficiency.

 

[OrvGull]

Injection of steam into the flare improves its burning efficiency.

Huh, why is that? Better mixing?

 

[ITLlama]

At my college we ran a cogeneration power plant. It was powered by a combination of methane from the local dump, and natural gas. Because of the inconsistency in the supply, you had to feed it with a steady source to keep the power from going out unexpectedly. All the desktops had “save work often” signs on them for that reason. Couldn’t afford a UPS at every workstation. Cut the power bill in half, including the cost of the generation facility and having Siemens manage it professionally for us.

 

[=j]

Cutting those emissions would require some sort of infrastructure investment; which means money would be spent on something that, while good for humanity as a whole, does not increase shareholder revenue.

Being able to sell the gas would definitely increase shareholder revenue, but the problem is it's really hard to build new gas pipelines. Just the permitting for it is a years-long process with no guarantee it will succeed. You can truck out oil or move it by train but the only way to economically move natural gas is with a pipeline.

While I have no direct experience in either gas pipeline or electric grid permitting, my understanding is the former is much easier than the later.

 

[=j]

Injection of steam into the flare improves its burning efficiency.

If you have a reliable source of steam, you might as well generate power instead of flaring it.

 

[Magog14]

Just capure it and sell it ffs. Why frack when gas is literally being wasted?

 

[OrvGull]

At my college we ran a cogeneration power plant. It was powered by a combination of methane from the local dump, and natural gas. Because of the inconsistency in the supply, you had to feed it with a steady source to keep the power from going out unexpectedly. All the desktops had “save work often” signs on them for that reason. Couldn’t afford a UPS at every workstation. Cut the power bill in half, including the cost of the generation facility and having Siemens manage it professionally for us.

That's pretty cool. Cogen plants are fairly common on college campuses that have a steam utility. If you're running a boiler to produce steam for building heat you might as well put a turbine in the loop, run your boiler a little hotter, and use the waste steam from the turbine to heat your buildings. The ones on campuses I've frequented were all just using piped natural gas, though, sometimes after conversions. (Michigan State used to use coal and wood chips, Michigan Tech used to use fuel oil.)

 

[Wickwick]

Injection of steam into the flare improves its burning efficiency.

If you have a reliable source of steam, you might as well generate power instead of flaring it.

Steam is easy especially if you have gas you need to flare. High pressure and high quality steam is required to make useful power.

 

[Uiop999]

Considering how much flaring happens routinely every day, it boggles my mind we haven't come up with practical uses for "waste" gas.

I dunno, trailer-mounted gas turbine generators that can be moved to whichever wells need them?

 

[Wickwick]

Injection of steam into the flare improves its burning efficiency.

Huh, why is that? Better mixing?

I'm guessing it has to do with the temperature of the reactants. Hot methane is much closer to ignition than is cold methane. So it takes less time to ignite and therefore can't escape the ignition source before reacting.

But I'm not speaking from actual knowledge. I'm just trying to figure it out from context.

 

[OrvGull]

Injection of steam into the flare improves its burning efficiency.

If you have a reliable source of steam, you might as well generate power instead of flaring it.

Steam is easy especially if you have gas you need to flare. High pressure and high quality steam is required to make useful power.

And running gas turbines off "sour" gas is not easy to do reliably, although there's a lot of research into it for obvious reasons.

One of the reasons that selling this gas is hard (besides transportation) is it's got all kinds of contaminants in it that you have to separate out first. You can't put gas with hydrogen sulfide or water in it in a pipeline for corrosion reasons.

 

[adespoton]

Here's a question: how much natural gas actually makes it to consuming devices in the US each year?
In comparison, how much natural gas is flared after extraction in the US each year?
And in comparison to THAT, how much natural gas is leaked after extraction in the US each year?

I currently don't have a concept of how these numbers compare to each other. While we definitely want to limit both methane AND CO2 emissions at all points, it would be useful to know where to focus the most attention.

 

[SirMrManGuy]

At an oilfield in southern Louisiana, several flares were replaced by generators to power a crypto mining facility.

Not feasible. If it was, they could (and should) skip the crypto and just generate electricity for more productive uses.

Unfortunately it probably is feasible depending on crypto price vs gas price vs local electricity price. Building an electric transmission line from the oil field to the local grid where power could be sold is probably a large percentage of the cost of the generating unit. A local crypto server farm and cogen possibly makes sense as all you need to export is data.

PS I hate crypto.

 

[Fancy Internet Person]

At an oilfield in southern Louisiana, several flares were replaced by generators to power a crypto mining facility.

Not feasible. If it was, they could (and should) skip the crypto and just generate electricity for more productive uses.

This article disagrees.

The location wasn't Louisiana, but that's not relevant to the point.

EDIT - link formatting

That's just a press release from the company.

 

[Wickwick]

Here's a question: how much natural gas actually makes it to consuming devices in the US each year?
In comparison, how much natural gas is flared after extraction in the US each year?
And in comparison to THAT, how much natural gas is leaked after extraction in the US each year?

I currently don't have a concept of how these numbers compare to each other. While we definitely want to limit both methane AND CO2 emissions at all points, it would be useful to know where to focus the most attention.

The flare stacks from the article here are at oil wells. The flares aren't at natural gas extraction sites.

Natural gas producers have lots of leaks but they're economically motivated to capture the leaking gas.

Ars ran an article about these emitters in March. Perhaps that has some information you'd find interesting.

 

[adespoton]

Here's a question: how much natural gas actually makes it to consuming devices in the US each year?
In comparison, how much natural gas is flared after extraction in the US each year?
And in comparison to THAT, how much natural gas is leaked after extraction in the US each year?

I currently don't have a concept of how these numbers compare to each other. While we definitely want to limit both methane AND CO2 emissions at all points, it would be useful to know where to focus the most attention.

The flare stacks from the article here are at oil wells. The flares aren't at natural gas extraction sites.

Natural gas producers have lots of leaks but they're economically motivated to capture the leaking gas.

Ars ran an article about these emitters in March. Perhaps that has some information you'd find interesting.

Thanks; this framing puts that article in a much different context for me than it did in March, when I was just considering gas extraction and not oil well emissions.

 

[Wickwick]

With the attack on the Nordstream 1 and 2 pipelines, I think the timing for this article is rather poor.

But it's nice to know what it would take to compensate for that too.

Even just leaks of storage tanks can cause massive problems.

 

[Wickwick]

Just capure it and sell it ffs. Why frack when gas is literally being wasted?

The answer is in the article. These are oil wells releasing and flaring the methane. Oil wells don't necessarily have a gas pipeline nearby. Fracking extraction includes building pipelines to carry the gas that's released. Fracking is designed from the start to deal with gas. Oil extraction is designed to carry liquids.

 

[traumadog]

Injection of steam into the flare improves its burning efficiency.

Huh, why is that? Better mixing?

I'm guessing it has to do with the temperature of the reactants. Hot methane is much closer to ignition than is cold methane. So it takes less time to ignite and therefore can't escape the ignition source before reacting.

But I'm not speaking from actual knowledge. I'm just trying to figure it out from context.

Even with the need for ignition close to the well site, I'd hate to think that putting an air-to-water heat exchanger in the existing flare stream to generate steam for a generator would be a hugely cost-prohibitive solution.

 

[bman212121]

Since this article is on the subject, I've always wondered how many BTU one of those flare stacks output. It seems like a 20' tall flame might have a bigger impact on warming than 1,000 homes changing their thermostats from 70 to 68 but it's really hard to say without knowing the actual numbers.

One of the other considerations is for light pollution they seem to have no issue brightening up the sky. I wonder if there isn't a way to burn these with some type of shielding around the flame which could make them more efficient while cutting down excess radiation.

 

[Wickwick]

Injection of steam into the flare improves its burning efficiency.

Huh, why is that? Better mixing?

I'm guessing it has to do with the temperature of the reactants. Hot methane is much closer to ignition than is cold methane. So it takes less time to ignite and therefore can't escape the ignition source before reacting.

But I'm not speaking from actual knowledge. I'm just trying to figure it out from context.

Even with the need for ignition close to the well site, I'd hate to think that putting an air-to-water heat exchanger in the existing flare stream to generate steam for a generator would be a hugely cost-prohibitive solution.

If the only reason for the gain in combustion efficiency is due to temperature, there's lots of ways to accomplish that with better-designed flaring hardware that don't require steam. The exhaust gas of the flare stack is hot after all. Some sort of EGR system could directly convert some of the combustion products into ignition enhancers or a counter flow heat exchanger could simply preheat the air.

But anything is more expensive than a pilot flame on a BBQ-style burner which is about what most flaring hardware is.

 

[sirlurkalot]

Injection of steam into the flare improves its burning efficiency.

Huh, why is that? Better mixing?

It adds oxygen to the flare gas stream.

Therefore better combustion at the burner tip.

In the business it's called an overhead disposal furnace.

The gases and liquids burned in the flare are ether to unstable to be transported off the refining site, or are product steams that are left over from the process of refining, or an escape route for product in case of a refinery process upset.