Webinar: Reducing gas flaring - monetising gas instead - understanding what is possible

Free

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Friday, June 30, 2023
Webinar
Online

Oil and gas companies, regulators and NGOs all understand that gas flaring is bad, with environmental, health and financial damage. And it can no longer be hidden, now it can be identified and quantified with satellite imagery, and worldwide flaring data is now being shared. They should look for ways to make money from the gas instead of wasting it.

Yet in many cases, flaring cannot be avoided – gas is produced together with oil which cannot be used without pipelines or liquefaction facilities, and the volumes are not big enough to justify building it. Also sometimes gas needs to be flared for unplanned reasons such as equipment breakdown.

We’ll explore the issues in our webinar on June 30th.

We’ll have a case study from the Wressle oilfield, Lincolnshire, UK, which began production of 500 barrels a day in 2021, showing what the flaring looks like on a satellite, and how the operator, Egdon Resources, is finding a way to monetise the gas by selling to a nearby power station.

We’ll have a broader view from Peter Sawyer of WSS Energy, about the commercial and engineering challenges of monetising small volumes of gas, showing how the costs of flare gas processing and export to market can be prohibitively high, with many operators still viewing gas as a waste stream rather than a potential source of revenue.

Flare gas recovery can work if you have a clean methane stream with high pressure and a high flow rate with a simple export route. But most volumes of flared gas are the opposite, low pressure, containing hydrogen sulphide and other contaminants, variable flow rates and distant from any processing facilities.

Peter has been working with operators in South America and the Middle East to assess the feasibility of challenging flare gas recovery through gas to power, LPG and gas sweetening – with his experience showing there is no one size fits all solution.

Nobody is suggesting that flaring is fine, but a better understanding of what reductions, and how fast reductions, can be achieved within commercial constraints, might be useful, for both planned and unplanned flaring. And further, if we could establish shareable ‘templates’ about proven workable methods to reduce flaring that could be very helpful to all.

In its 2022 Global Gas Flaring Tracker, the World Bank reported that, in 2021, 144 billion cubic metres of gas - almost double the UK's annual consuption - was needlessly burnt in flares at upstream oil and gas facilities across the globe, resulting in approximately 400 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalent emissions, of which 361 MMtCO2e was in the form of CO2 and 39 MMtCO2e was in the form of methane.

Agenda