Gas flaring news round up: 3 September

Some significant flaring news this week. Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions or ideas. You can reach our team on contact@capterio.com.

• Capterio’s flare-tracking tool Flareintel is mentioned in the “Redefing Energy” podcast with Georges Tijbosch from MiQ. As chair Laurent Seglan said, “[there is increasingly] sophisticated satellite tracking of every field: if you go to the Capterio website you can track flaring at every field. That brings me hope”.
  
  
• Iraq’s Oil Minister and the IEA’s Executive Director authored an article “without help for oil-producing countries, net zero by 2050 is a distant dream“. The article highlights gas flaring in Iraq as a key example, and argues that financial resources, expertise and policies are needed to transform these economies in an equitable, affordable way.
  
  
• Interesting article on offsets in the FT “Carbon offsets: a licence to pollute or a path to net zero emissions?” this week that starts with a question around the veracity of “carbon neutral LNG”. We’ve covered this topic with our recent paper “flaring in the LNG supply chain“. Our view is simple, we need (1) comprehensive assessment of scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions, (2) clear adn robust methods for offset accounting, and (3) disclosure of the details. You might find this LinkedIn post which aggregates some of the best articles interesting reading.
  
  
• An article called “Slow Burn” written by Christian Schaudwet in De Tagesspiegel is now available on our website here. The article highlights the relatively low indigenous gas flaring in Germany, but also talks to the significant volumes of embedded flaring emissions associated with oil and gas imports.
  
  
• Nature had an interesting piece on gas flaring here that highlights the role of methane in the carbon challenge and talks to the good work by Carbon Mapper, the EDF and the European Commission’s International Methane Emissions Observatory and others.
  
  
• Finally, Capterio has also been in the news with GeoExPro, which states “Capterio, a company which uses independent and verified third-party satellite data to track gas flares, released its free-to-download FlareIntel application recently. With this level of transparency available to the public, it can surely only add pressure on governments and companies to start seriously addressing this issue”.