Permian Basin Natural Gas Flaring During Cold Crash Totaled 1.6 Billion Cubic Feet In One Day

[hatrack]

As Texas was crippled last month by frigid temperatures that killed more than 100 people and triggered widespread blackouts, drilling companies in the state’s largest oil field were forced to burn off an extraordinary amount of natural gas — on the worst day, an amount that could have powered tens of thousands of homes for at least a year.

The need to intentionally burn off, or flare, an estimated 1.6 billion cubic feet of gas in a single day — a fivefold increase from rates seen before the crisis, according to satellite analysis — came as the state’s power plants went offline and pipelines froze, so the wells simply had no place to send the natural gas still streaming out of the ground. As a result, the gas had to be set ablaze, fueling towering flames, the highest of which can reach hundreds of feet into the air.

“This is clearly one of the highest spikes” in flaring ever observed in the Permian Basin, said Mark Omara, a senior researcher at the Environmental Defense Fund who led the analysis, which was based on satellite data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “And it could be an underestimate,” he said. The trends were corroborated by Mikhail Zhizhin, a researcher at the Colorado School of Mines, who pioneered the use of satellite observations to measure flaring. There were some uncertainties and limitations to using satellite data, he said: Clouds could obscure the view, for example, and smaller flares, or ones that are lit only for shorter periods of time, could be missed. And calculating volumes of gas needed to be calibrated for specific oil fields.

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But in the United States, flaring as well as venting — the even more harmful practice of releasing unburned natural gas directly into the atmosphere — hit all-time highs before the pandemic as drilling outpaced the construction of pipelines and other infrastructure necessary to carry the gas away to be used. Many producers in the Permian drill primarily for oil, not natural gas, and therefore simply flare off much of the gas that comes up alongside the oil because they deem it not worth the effort or expense to capture and sell. And the accuracy of flare volume data, which is self-reported by operators, has been difficult to assess.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/26/climate/texas-blackout-flaring-natural-gas.html?smid=tw-share

[marble falls]

1. A couple of them up in the patch are HUGE. The line is they can't pipe it or store it: there's ...

... "too much".

[hatrack]

2. Yes, the clean fuel of the future, but it's just . . . too . . . expensive . . . to . . . capture .

[magicarpet]

3. Methane is worse that carbon dioxide,....

In the first two decades after its release, methane is 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide. We must address both types of emissions if we want to reduce the impact of climate change.

While methane doesn't linger as long in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, it is initially far more devastating to the climate because of how effectively it absorbs heat.

Because methane is so potent, and because we have solutions that reduce emissions, addressing methane is the fastest, most effective way to slow the rate of warming now.


https://www.edf.org/climate/methane-other-important-greenhouse-gas