[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.