Why do oil fields burn gas they could sell?
Because moving gas needs pipelines or liquefaction plants, and many fields are too small or too remote to justify them.
Oil travels in trucks, ships and tanks. Gas does not. It needs a pipeline, a compressor station or a liquefaction plant before it can reach a customer, and each of those is a large fixed investment. When a field produces only a little gas, or sits hundreds of kilometres from the nearest network, the numbers do not add up and the gas gets burned.
Some flaring is also a safety measure. When a plant shuts down suddenly, the flare stack is the pressure relief valve for the whole facility. That is called emergency or safety flaring and no regulator expects it to disappear. The target is routine flaring, the kind that goes on every day because nobody built a use for the gas.
Burning is still better than releasing the gas unburned. Methane traps far more heat than carbon dioxide, so regulators treat venting as the worse practice. The World Bank and the United Nations launched a Zero Routine Flaring by 2030 initiative in 2015, and many governments and oil companies have signed it.
- Methane versus CO2
- Around 28 to 30 times the warming effect over 100 years (IPCC Sixth Assessment)
- Zero Routine Flaring
- World Bank and UN initiative launched in 2015, target year 2030
Explainers describe how things generally work. They are not advice for a specific project or country. See our editorial policy.