Sure if it's 2.6%, 97.4% will be released in some form at some point, but those 2.6% are lost with a utility/greenhouse ratio of effectively zero. But the marg

Sure if it's 2.6%, 97.4% will be released in some form at some point, but those 2.6% are lost with a utility/greenhouse ratio of effectively zero. But the marginal utility of capturing that gas is negative: less than zero. (By the way it's 4.2%, not 2.6%; my post has an error and I can't edit it. There's a mismatch between the gas flaring and oil production figures: one is from 2011 (NYT article), the other 2012 (WSJ). It's a large error because oil production doubled in the space of a few months).