[pjc50]

My pet complaint, flaring: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mossmorran

It's pretty hard to care about saving energy when there's a hundred meter column of flame on the horizon. Mossmorran is an intermittent offender, but worldwide you would be appalled at how much gas is flared. It's probably enough to make up for the loss of Russian gas.

[JoeAltmaier]

This. The oil shale fields in the northern US flared all their gas, because the fields were new and there was no pipeline yet.

The collection of flares could easily be seen from space. It resembled a large city in brightness.

[s1artibartfast]

I never understood the strong emotional reaction to gas flaring. I think there is likely some excess use on the fringes, but my understanding is that in most cases not-flaring would be more wasteful.

[pjc50]

It's not complicated: it's wasting an irreplaceable resource (fossil fuel) and a difficult-to-replace resource (CO2 safe capacity), in large quantities, while at the same time everyone else is being asked to reduce their consumption.

It often costs more to not flare, which isn't quite the same kind of "wasteful", and sometimes it is necessary for safety reasons. But mostly it happens because gas is a "cheap" byproduct of production of other fuels.

[s1artibartfast]

I agree that a big part of the reason is that alternatives to routine flaring are economically wasteful.

I think that most people generally underappreciate the challenges associated with alternatives. Many alternatives require substantial infrastructure that will be under utilized to avoid flaring. If you have an oil drill in a remote location, there are huge material costs involved in either transporting the gas to a processing center, or converting it to liquid natural gas on site, and then transporting that (assuming there is a nearby market that will take it).

In your example of Mossmorran, I would really be interested in an analysis of the alternatives. I looked but couldn't find any. Would the plant need to be completely redesigned and rebuilt to avoid flaring? Maybe it is low hanging fruit and it could be avoided with some extra storage tanks. Maybe the nature of the flared gases are specialized would require the construction of a second plant to process.

Like I said above, I am sure there are some areas where alternatives are cost effective, or even mildly cost negative, but still should be implemented. On the other end of the spectrum, I am sure that there are cases where it would be more wasteful to capture the gas than shut down the wells entirely.

[cptskippy]

> I never understood the strong emotional reaction to gas flaring.

Ignorance.

> my understanding is that in most cases not-flaring would be more wasteful.

Case in point. Why would not releasing something that could be captured and sold be more wasteful?

[r00fus]

> my understanding is that in most cases not-flaring would be more wasteful

Can you explain this further?

[lobocinza]

Because it's methane and contribute more to global warming than the CO2 from it's burn. Though there's the expensive and not always practical alternative of selling it. It is difficult to transport/store natural gas.