![]() ![]() Offshore Canada has had a good success over the last 15 years. Where have you seen flaring regulations work? For instance, Russia won't say how much they are flaring, but we can see it from the satellite. Scientists there have developed ways to estimate the amount of gas flared using the brightness of the flare as seen from space. In many countries, we ended up using country-level average satellite data collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. One of the challenges with flaring is that most countries don't report it. In mapping the world's oil supply, how did you estimate emissions from flaring on a country-by-country basis? Necessarily, it's the first time we've been able to do this at this very resolved oil field-by-oil field level. With that, our paper covers about 98 percent of global oil supply. That allowed us to fill in gaps for a lot of smaller projects that are harder to get information on or the data gathering was just too intensive. Then we were able to collaborate with Aramco, an international oil company, to access a commercial data set. Otherwise, we go to petroleum engineering literature to get information about oil fields. Environmental agencies and natural resource agencies will also report information we can use. For some countries you can get data from governmental sources or regulatory agencies. This is the culmination of a larger project we've been working on for eight or so years. What data did you look at to do this work? This work represents the first study breaking down oil-industry greenhouse gas emissions at the country level. There are some efforts underway to try to tackle this - the World Bank has a big effort called the Global Gas Flaring Reduction Partnership, where companies have banded together to try to set flaring targets, so hopefully this will start to decline. I think setting the expectation that the gas will be managed properly is the role of the regulatory environment. Thankfully, there is some value to the gas, so there can be some savings associated with stopping flaring. In this case, companies want to get rid of the gas, so they often burn - or flare - it. However, if you're very far offshore or can't get the gas to market, there's often no economically feasible outlet for the gas. If there are nearby gas pipelines, then power plants, factories, businesses and homes can consume the gas. Oil and gas are generally produced together. What is flaring and why is it especially important to track? Brandt spoke with Stanford Report about the group's findings and strategies for reducing flaring. The group found that the burning of unwanted gas associated with oil production - called flaring - remains the most carbon-intensive part of producing oil. Now, Adam Brandt, assistant professor of energy resources engineering in the School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences at Stanford, and his colleagues have performed a first global analysis comparing emissions associated with oil production techniques - a step toward developing policies that could reduce those emissions. ![]()
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