25th October: weekly flaring news round up

Here’s a round of some of the most significant news around gas flaring last week.

FlareIntel / Capterio

• Capterio’s CEO, Mark Davis, was featured in the front-page article of the Washington PCapterio’s CEO, Mark Davis, features in an article published today in the Washington Post called “Russia allows methane leaks at planet’s peril“. The article highlights not only the very high levels of methane emissions from the oil and gas industry (in the form of “venting” and “leaking”), but also the very high levels of gas flaring. See this link for a summary of the piece on flaring.
  
• Have you signed up to FlareIntel, our free tracking tool yet? This week we reached a key milestone of 1000 users! We built this tool to (a) increase awareness of gas flaring, (b) increase accountability, and (c) encourage / facilitate investment.

• Mark Davis and John-Henry Charles featured on the popular science YouTube channel “Engineering with Rosie” this week with an interesting short video. Check it out here!

Industry

• The EDF put our a super interesting report “The Burning Question: how to fix flaring” this week. Led by Andrew Howell, the report gives an excellent overview of flaring, highlights the performance and practices of some of the leaders and laggards in the US and makes some clear recommendations around the need for increased commitments, disclosure, a sharper focus on methane and on non-operated assets. We agree, and have argued similar points in our paper “why we need clearer ESG metrics around gas flaring“. Great to see this strong convergence.
  
• Great to see that the UK’s Neptune energy joins the zero routine flaring by 2030 initiative. Their Algerian asset Touat has historically had some significant flaring challenges, but good to see that the performance has significantly improved in recent months.
  
• Interesting article out in the Petroleum Economist on how gas is at the heart of Iraq’s energy transition. Whilst the article mentions flaring once, it is mostly focussed on the opportunities in non-associated gas.
  
• The debate around using flare gas to mine cryptocurrencies is hotting up in Russia, although the laws around this remain rather unclear.