Gas flaring is increasing again, requiring stronger regulations

Gas flaring – in which oil and gas companies burn gas released during oil extraction – rose globally last year to its highest level since 2019, despite growing international efforts to regulate and curb polluting practices.

According to satellite data released by the World Bank on Thursday, gas flaring increased by 7% in 2023, reversing the decline from 2022. This increase resulted in additional planet-warming emissions equivalent to 23 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) – as case added that about 5 million cars will appear on the roads.

Burning gas produces greenhouse gas emissions, including soot and methane, which over 20 years have a warming effect approximately 80 times stronger than CO2.

The countries most likely to flare gas in 2023 were Russia, Iran, Iraq and the United States, with just nine countries accounting for 75% of gas flaring globally.

There was also an increase in flaring intensity last year, which means the amount of gas burned per barrel of oil produced, as oil prices rose above $90 a barrel in the fall.

In some countries, such as Iran and Libya, increased flaring intensity has been attributed to increased oil production combined with a lack of investment and prioritization of gas extraction and use.

Intensity was also high in conflict-affected countries such as Syria, where operators have difficulty dealing with torches.

“We hope this is something of an anomaly and the long-term trend will be one of dramatic reductions,” said Zubin Bamji, manager of the World Bank’s Global Flaring and Methane Reduction (GFMR) Partnership, which monitors flaring and supports governments and operators oil fields to reduce related emissions.

Separation trend

That hope is based on “separating the long-standing correlation between oil production and gas flaring” since the late 1990s, Bamji explained in emailed comments.

Operators can minimize flaring by using measures such as reinjecting the gas back into the ground or capturing it for use.

Demetrios Papathanasiou, director of the World Bank’s global energy and mining practice, said in a data statement that if wasted gas were captured and used, it could replace dirtier energy and generate enough energy to double sub-Saharan Africa’s electricity supply.

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Others, however, argue that using gas flares more efficiently or regulating gas flares and their associated methane emissions will not eliminate the practice as long as fossil fuels continue to be produced.

“The most important thing we need to do is bring down the oil and gas industry,” said Lorne Stockman, co-director of research at Oil Change International (OCI), a nonprofit group that campaigns against fossil fuels.

Promises and regulations

The increase in flaring suggests that growing global attention and initiatives to eliminate flaring have not been “sufficient and sustained enough,” according to a World Bank report.

Operators and countries representing around 60% of flaring globally have supported the World Bank’s Zero Routine Flaring by 2030 (ZRF) initiative, while 155 countries have signed the Global Methane Commitment, announced at the 2021 COP26 climate summit, aimed at collectively reducing methane emissions.

Jonathan Banks, global director of methane pollution prevention at the Clean Air Task Force, an environmental group focused on decarbonizing energy, said the initiatives are “helpful.”

But he added that governments and businesses still “are not doing enough” to stop burning greenhouse gases, either in the form of policies forcing companies to take action or energy companies’ own plans and investments.

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This is changing, said Banks, referring to regulations recently introduced in the US, Canada and the European Union aimed at reducing methane emissions. “But implementing and enforcing these new policies takes time,” he noted.

The EU’s methane strategy adopted in May will include a methane transparency requirement for gas imports that will penalize the burning and flaring of gas – an even more polluting practice of releasing unlit gas.

“The potential to use access to the European market to motivate action is enormous,” Banks said, adding that only a global standard, applied to all internationally traded oil and gas, could end gas flaring and flaring.

Gas “Certificate” in the USA

Without such a standard, oil and gas companies are effectively on their own when it comes to broader reductions in flaring and methane emissions.

In the US, for example, third-party gas “certification” companies track methane emissions from oil and gas infrastructure and tell consumers that their gas comes from a “responsible source.”

According to OCI, there is no established standard for what level of methane leak reduction qualifies natural gas for this label.

“A few years ago, methane became a reputational issue for the U.S. oil and gas industry,” OCI’s Stockman said. “We suddenly saw an increase in the number of companies offering methane monitoring and providing certificates to gas producers as an incentive to sign up.”

Gas certification is now part of voluntary efforts by oil and gas companies to address methane pollution – in the U.S., Colorado is the only state that directly measures methane emissions from oil and gas infrastructure. However, according to OCI, the industry is pushing regulators to use certification “as a substitute function for regulatory oversight.”

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Research by Earthworks and OCI found that these certification companies use unreliable technology that resulted in missing all but one of the emissions “events” recorded by the researchers’ own monitoring equipment.

They also found conflicts of interest on the part of certification company leaders and board members, including maintaining investments with the same oil and gas clients they worked with and promoting fossil gas as a clean energy source.

Stockman said regulations are needed and must be monitored by governments, and are almost impossible to enforce on a large scale due to practical and technological limitations.

Even satellite technology has limited ability to observe small-scale emissions in “hundreds of thousands of individual locations,” he said.

“We cannot trust the industry,” he added. “The way to get methane out of the atmosphere is to keep it in the ground.”

(Reporting by Daisy Clague; Editing by Megan Rowling)