This is factually incorrect and has the direction of causality wrong.
Enclosed combustors are _more_ efficient than flares, and can be tested to show that they achieve complete combustion of methane (unlike flares, which do not combust all methane.) Because of this efficiency delta, enclosed combustors were introduced to adhere to new air quality regulations.
I.e. regulators forced companies to install them to improve their emissions; they aren't being installed to hide emissions.
"Enclosed flaring is, in truth, probably less efficient than a typical flare. It’s better than venting, but going from a flare to an enclosed flare or a vapor combustor is not an improvement in reducing emissions", based on vibes from a former regulator from the linked article, is incorrect. E.g. see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266679082...
Ground-based laser methane detection is sensitive enough to quantify hidden emissions, no matter how diffuse gas companies make the plume. Here's two companies operating in this space:
That's around flaring, which is a bit different. Energy companies are very likely to buy the same data. Detecting methane leaks is a _good_ thing for them, both from an "avoiding fines" perspective and also from a "this is infrastructure we _want_ to fix" perspective.
Banning routine flaring is a very good thing that needs to happen in more places. You _do_ still need to flare. There are lots of time periods where it will be required for safety reasons. But currently, it's common to simply flare methane that's produced instead of trying to use it. Methane can't be easily transported, and you need a pipeline to a populated area to use it unless you build expensive LNG facilities or slightly less expensive facilities to reinject it back into the subsurface. So remote oil fields are designed to flare off the methane that's produced alongside oil production, often for vast quantities of methane. That's "routine flaring". It's better (both from a safety perspective and a greenhouse gas perspective) than directly releasing it. However, it's far better to reinject it back into the reservoir (or another reservoir) or otherwise find some use for it than to flare it.
Routine flaring is used quite simply because regulators allow it. If you change the regulations, then companies will take the more expensive route or develop other resources. If you don't, then they're more or less legally required (read: shareholders _will_ have grounds to dismiss the CEO) to take the legal and much cheaper route of flaring methane that can't easily be sold. Can you really justify to shareholders that you're going to spend an extra several tens of billions USD to do something that isn't required and that your competitors aren't and that won't increase profits at all? The regulatory environment has to change for that to happen, but it's a patchwork and not some global thing. The EU has been leading there.
But detecting flares (even "hidden" ones) is _much_ easier than detecting methane leaks. Methane leaks are pretty damned insidious and hard to find. That's a big part of why they're so common. Hyperspectral imaging is _really_ damned cool, and while I'm certainly biased, the Tanager satellite they used there is really really neat.
Edit: Apparently that's the airborne equivalent of Tanager, not Tanager. (Same instrument design, but one is on a plane and one just launched into space not-too-long-ago.)
Venting is like an order of magnitude worse than flaring right? So until we've dealt with most of the venting there's not much benefit in going after the flaring operations right? We should encourage flaring as a way to solve venting?
Yes, enclosed flaring is better than venting. However it makes it more difficult for third-party monitoring, the linked article mentions this:
>"If you enclose the flare, people don’t see it, so they don’t complain about it. But it also means it’s not visible from space by most of the methods used to track flare volumes.”
Enclosed combustors are _more_ efficient than flares, and can be tested to show that they achieve complete combustion of methane (unlike flares, which do not combust all methane.) Because of this efficiency delta, enclosed combustors were introduced to adhere to new air quality regulations.
I.e. regulators forced companies to install them to improve their emissions; they aren't being installed to hide emissions.
"Enclosed flaring is, in truth, probably less efficient than a typical flare. It’s better than venting, but going from a flare to an enclosed flare or a vapor combustor is not an improvement in reducing emissions", based on vibes from a former regulator from the linked article, is incorrect. E.g. see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266679082...