American Opinion: Flaring pollutes and wastes resources. Stop it
American Opinion: We wouldn’t cotton to farmers burning up renewable resources like wheat. We shouldn’t stand for oil producers doing the same with our state’s precious nonrenewable resources.
Written By:
Dallas Morning News Editorial Board | 7:30 am, May 5, 2021 ×
Flared natural gas is burned off at Apache Corporations operations at the Deadwood natural gas plant in the Permian Basin on Feb. 5, 2015, in Garden City, Texas. (File photo/Spencer Platt/Getty Images/TNS)
Imagine you’re a wheat farmer in the Texas Panhandle. Last summer, you harvested a bumper crop. When the combines left, you baled the straw into round half-ton rolls and stacked them on the edge of your field.
Flaring pollutes and wastes resources. Stop it.
BP plans to end flaring by 2025. Everyone in the Permian Basin should do the same.
A gas flare burns past a pump jack in the Permian Basin.(Angus Mordant / Bloomberg)
And then you set them on fire.
No farmer would do such a thing, but that’s a pretty accurate representation of flaring, a common method of disposing of natural-gas byproduct at oil wells. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Texas producers wasted 700 million cubic feet of natural gas every day in 2019. That’s enough to provide natural gas to every home in the state.
Hidden Super Polluters Revealed in Wake of Texas Energy Crisis By Kevin Crowley | May 3, 2021
The polar blast in Texas earlier this year revealed a dirty secret in the most prolific U.S. oil field: Two under-the-radar natural gas plants that are a persistent source of pollution.
Natural disasters in the state often turn into environmental disasters, and February’s cold wave was no exception. Stricken by power outages and mechanical failures, industrial facilities burned off or released huge quantities of hazardous gases as they shut down. The worst culprits, however, weren’t the vast petrochemical complexes on the Gulf Coast but the two Permian Basin facilities that take raw gas from wells and purify it into sales-quality fuel.
February’s energy crisis did something no Texas politician has done in decades: It brought Texans together to demand our leaders in Austin fix the flawed energy system that failed so miserably, caused nearly $300 billion in damage and killed.
A global oil and gas giant sought to eliminate most flaring in the next five years, led by a facility in the Permian Basin.
BP announced it was moving toward zero routine flaring, or the burning off of excess natural gas, by 2025 this week, and that it was building an electrified oil, gas and water handling facility in Orla, Texas near the state’s border with New Mexico.
Flaring can be used as a cost-saving measure by operators without the capacity to send all their produced gas to market, or as a safety precaution to ensure safe pressures at oil and gas facilities.