The volume of gas flared in the world has been reduced in 2022 to 139 billion cubic meters. In Africa, Algeria, Libya and Nigeria are among the nine largest gas “flares” in the world. While Nigeria is the country with the most considerable drop in the volume of gas flared, Algeria the nation with the largest additional volume last year.
Campaigns against burning around the world are beginning to bear fruit, although the reduction process is slow.
This industrial practice that consists of burning gas by means of “torches” during the different stages of oil production.
In fact, during oil extraction, gas and water can rise to the surface. Once separated from water and oil, the gas, considered a by-product, is burned on site due to a lack of treatment infrastructure (liquefaction, compression, purification unit) or transportation (gas pipeline).
Flaring dropped significantly in 2022, standing at 139 billion cubic meters, its lowest level since 2010. However, this volume remains significant and represents losses of several billion dollars per year, in addition to constituting an ecological disaster..
Global intensity, that is, the amount of gas flared per barrel of oil produced, has fallen to its lowest level since the beginning of satellite data collection, in a context marked by a 5% increase in oil production last year. past. An evolution that testifies to the progressive and sustainable decoupling of oil production and flaring,” according to a report by the Global Alliance for Gas Flare Reduction (GGFR) ), which cites the digital Le360.
The fact is that globally, despite this drop, the amount of gas flared is still very high. According to estimates from this entity, 139 billion cubic meters of gas were flared in oil and gas facilities worldwide in 2022, compared to 144 billion cubic meters in 2021, a reduction of 3%. “The decrease is equivalent to the elimination of three million road vehicles,” according to the report. This volume corresponds to the combined annual gas consumption of Germany and France.
The burning is explained by the fact that the oil companies do not want to invest in the recovery of the gas that accompanies the extraction of the oil because this requires the establishment of infrastructures different from those used for the gas, while Investment profitability is far from assured if associated gas volumes are not large and world market prices are low.
Globally, nine countries are responsible for the vast majority of burning: Russia, Iraq, Iran, Algeria, Venezuela, the United States, Mexico, Libya and Nigeria. “These countries account for nearly three-quarters of the volumes of gas flared for less than half of world oil production,” the World Bank report notes.
For the producing states, the recovery of this gas could have positive repercussions, as it is reinjected to increase the pressure and improve the oil recovery rate, use it in situ as a source of energy for electric turbines, evacuate it to existing gas pipelines, transform it into a liquefied petroleum (LPG) and/or methanol.
In addition to the economic impacts, burning also it has negative environmental impacts due to C02 emissions. In fact, according to the GGFR report, the burning released 315 million tons of carbon dioxide and 42 million tons of methane into the atmosphere.