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Flaring gas normalizes the pressure inside a mixed well, allowing oil to be pumped at atmospheric pressure. That's a much cheaper way of getting to the oil than
by SuoDuanDao 7y ago
Flaring gas normalizes the pressure inside a mixed well, allowing oil to be pumped at atmospheric pressure. That's a much cheaper way of getting to the oil than any of the alternatives (which basically require working with a high pressure right at the wellhead, a very dangerous practice). As for why the companies don't just harvest the gas first then get the oil, gas is harder to transport. The places I worked with flare stacks were well off the beaten path, oil was stored in 400 barrel tanks and brought out with trucks. There's no such system for gas, hence why it's considered a nuisance by a lot of drillers.
- jacobush 7y agoIt is a nuisance - it should be fixed by making it mandatory to harvest it.
- r-bryan 7y agoActually, just leave it all in the ground.
- exabrial 7y agoThis. Comment. Of note: Gas requires a pipeline. Take a look at some recent well-meaning protests around pipelines; they've likely had the opposite of the desired effect. Compromise would be way better than "my way or the highway" extremist positions.
- viraptor 7y agoWeren't the protests about oil pipelines mostly? We've seen those fail with bad environmental effects a few times now. Apart from stricter and enforced safety rules, I'm not sure what could lead to a compromise here?
- fencepost 7y agoMore than that in some cases - oil pipelines through areas basically regarded as burial grounds. "Son, this is where your ancestors were buried, but we're not quite sure what happened to their remains after the oil company scraped the top few feet of soil in the 2026 oil spill cleanup and 'remediated' with clean soil imported from somewhere else."
- whenchamenia 7y agoPipelines, even with their faults, are cleaner and safer than trucking.
- exabrial 7y agoModern pipelines carry a multitude of stuff, they separate it with giant blasts of compressed air. Obviously it'd be best if we didn't use any hydrocarbons for burning, but the alternatives to pipelines in the current economy are: * Flare the gas off, instant C02 * Train crashes * Increase well head pressures creating an explosion hazard (and if it blows, you now have a oil well fire) * Put it through older pipelines engineered to safety standards of the 1950s
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- DoctorOetker 7y agowhy can't they use a fraction of the flaring gas to liquify the rest of the flaring gas? then the liquid gas can be transported just like the oil barrels to the pipeline-connected world
- technofiend 7y agoThat would be nice but gas liquefaction units were still quite expensive and large, too much so to put one at a single well last time I checked. I haven't been in O & G in a while but I don't think it's changed based on comments elsewhere in this thread.
- DoctorOetker 7y agoAre the liquefaction unit's replacement-or-repair costs higher than the value of barrels of liquid gas could generate? If not what is the timescale to pay itself back? Would the following alternative work? : The well delivers barrels filled with oil to the connected world, and thus needs a constant supply of empty oil barrels. Why not fill them with liquid nitrogen (generated at large "economy of scale" liquefaction units at the connected world) and use this to liquefy the gas at the remote well?
- scottlocklin 7y agoLiquification plants typically cost billions of dollars. People are working on things which look like they're more in the 10's of millions range (just eyeballing the machinery and estimating by visible mass of machinery -it's not like they have a website they sell them on), but it's not clear they're cost effective. https://nubluenergy.com/lng-facility-implementation/ https://nubluenergy.com/lng-facility-implementation/ Re: your liquid nitrogen idea; "that's not how physics works." Even if you could store liquid nitrogen in oil barrels (you can't) ... how does that help you?
- DoctorOetker 7y agouhm, it helps by providing a cool heat bath to pump the gas heat into? the idea is not to store liquid nitrogen in the barrels, but merely transport them to onsite storage? Edit: it's not surprising that LNG liquefaction plants cost on the order of say billions of dollars: by economy of scale one is driven to build extremely large plants. This does not mean smaller (but less efficient) liquefaction plants at much lower costs are impossible, but it does mean those smaller plants don't reach the same efficiency as the bigger ones... (my refrigerator is condensing and freezing water from air...)