Last month the Texas Railroad Commission said it would tighten the rules for gas flaring at oil fields later this year.
Texas is the largest single producer of oil in the United States.
Every year, the oil and gas industry flares some 140 billion cubic meters of natural gas.
At oil fields, gas is flared when there are no pipelines to transport it to a collection or storage hub.
At refineries, some gases need to be flared to avoid explosions.
Many oil producers have no idea how much gas they are wasting through flaring because they have no monitoring systems.
A lot of oil producers, especially in the US can't afford to stop flaring.
Sp billions of cubic meters of unwanted gas are burned for disposal ... and emissions of both methane and carbon dioxide.
“When you look at the future, the Achilles heel of the gas industry is the methane emissions,” the head of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, said
In the United States, in the Permian alone, carbon dioxide emissions from gas flaring are set to drop by half during the second half of this year thanks to the well shut-ins producers were forced to implement in response to the oil demand—and price—crash from earlier this year, according to Rystad Energy.
In addition to the shut-ins, there will be fewer new wells brought online in the second half of the year, which would also contribute to the decline in flare-related emissions.
Gas flaring in the Permian hit an all-time high of 661 million cu ft of gas, it declined slightly to 500 million cu ft towards the end of the year and stayed there until the oil price crash.
If the Texas Railroad Commission does tighten rules for flaring, the decline would likely accelerate.
The World Bank, which has launched a “Zero Routine Flaring by 2030” initiative, has calculated that the amount of gas flared annually could generate as much as 750 billion kWh of electricity.
This is more than Africa’s total consumption.
Flaring in some large OPEC producers is very high.
“We cannot continue to waste this much natural gas and allow the practice of flaring to tarnish the reputation of our state’s thriving energy sector to the general public and investors on Wall Street,” the chairman of the Texas RRC said after the announcement of the planned flaring caps.