As Texas was crippled last month by frigid temperatures that
killed more than 100 people and triggered widespread blackouts, drilling
companies in the state’s largest oil field were forced to burn off an
extraordinary amount of natural gas — on the worst day, an amount that could
have powered tens of thousands of homes for at least a year.
اضافة اعلان
The need to intentionally burn off, or flare, an estimated 45 million
cubic meters of gas in a single day — a fivefold increase from rates seen before
the crisis, according to satellite analysis — came as the state’s power plants
went offline and pipelines froze, so the wells simply had no place to send the
natural gas still streaming out of the ground. As a result, the gas had to be
set ablaze, fueling towering flames, the highest of which can reach hundreds of
meters into the air.
“This is clearly one of the highest spikes” in flaring ever
observed in the Permian Basin, said Mark Omara, a senior researcher at the
Environmental Defense Fund who led the analysis, which was based on satellite
data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “And it could be
an underestimate,” he said.
The trends were corroborated by Mikhail Zhizhin, a researcher at
the Colorado School of Mines, who pioneered the use of satellite observations
to measure flaring. There were some uncertainties and limitations to using
satellite data, he said: Clouds could obscure the view, for example, and
smaller flares, or ones that are lit only for shorter periods of time, could be
missed. And calculating volumes of gas needed to be calibrated for specific oil
fields.
Still, “These are obvious outliers,” he said of the flaring
volumes seen during the blackout. “It’s a sizable event.”
The findings are the latest example of the consequences of the
Texas crisis that are only now becoming clearer. Far more people died in the
winter storm — at least 111 people lost their lives, nearly double an earlier
estimate — state officials said. They also underscore the risks of the state’s
heavy reliance on natural gas to generate power, even as some fossil-fuel
advocates misleadingly tried to blame frozen wind turbines for the blackouts.
Natural gas was once hailed as a “bridge” toward renewable forms
of energy such as wind or solar, because gas burns more cleanly than oil coal.
But in recent years, researchers and environmental groups have raised growing
concerns over the climate-change consequences of turning to natural gas.
Flaring is one reason. Burning off unused gas instead of capturing
it not only wastes a valuable energy source, it emits carbon dioxide, a
greenhouse gas that is the main contributor to climate change.
Of course, if there had been no Texas blackout crisis, much of
that natural gas would have been burned in power plants to supply energy to
homes and businesses. But flaring is also damaging because the burning is
sometimes incomplete, so it can also release uncombusted gases into the
atmosphere, chiefly methane, which is a far more potent greenhouse gas than
carbon dioxide in the shorter term.
Those emissions are just one part of the total amount of gases
released by processing plants refineries, power plants and other oil and gas
facilities as they struggled to cope with the extreme cold. Rystad Energy, a
research company, found that flaring from those facilities reached 5 million
cubic meters of gas a day in February, the highest since Rystad started
tracking the data in 2018.
“The extreme weather conditions that Texas experienced in
February forced many facilities to flare gas, as there was no other exit,”
Artem Abramov, head of shale research at Rystad, wrote in a research note. “Just
immediately closing the gas tap is not possible.”
Under pressure to rein in emissions from oil and gas production,
the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, a consortium of the world’s largest
producers, says its members aim to end routine flaring by 2030. But that pledge
would not cover flaring prompted by disruptions like the Texas freeze, or in
emergencies where flaring becomes necessary to reduce the risk of fires or
explosions.
Julien Perez, the consortium’s vice president for strategy and
policy, said in a statement that its members had collectively started to cut
down on flaring, “reflecting a shared commitment to reduce volumes of natural
gas flared.”
But in the United States, flaring as well as venting — the even
more harmful practice of releasing unburned natural gas directly into the
atmosphere — hit all-time highs before the pandemic as drilling outpaced the
construction of pipelines and other infrastructure necessary to carry the gas
away to be used.
The Biden administration has made addressing flaring and
venting, as well as methane leaks, a priority. One of President Joe Biden’s
first executive orders committed to reinstating and expanding regulations that
the Trump administration had moved to roll back.
Senate Democrats also plan to use an obscure legislative measure
to reinstate Obama-era methane rules. Senate Democrats have also introduced a
bill that would impose a fee on methane emissions from oil and gas production
that also presses companies to eliminate venting and flaring.
“What’s not acceptable is to continue to allow this industry to
dump millions of cubic meters of toxic natural gas into our atmosphere for free,
as if it was their dump,” Senate Sheldon Whitehouse, D Rhode Island, one of the
bill’s sponsors, said.
A separate study on emissions trends during the coronavirus
pandemic by scientists at the Environmental Defense Fund, Harvard University,
and other research institutions, to be published in the journal Atmospheric
Chemistry and Physics in the coming weeks, shows how even a relatively small decline
in production could yield
“It shows that if we reduce production, there are opportunities
to reduce emissions” even further, said Mary Kang, an assistant professor at
McGill University who researches emissions from oil and gas production and was
one of the study’s co-authors. “It’s a positive finding.”
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