USA TODAY International Edition
Our view: ‘Drill, baby, drill' turns to ‘burn, baby, burn'
As Europe bakes, wildfires burn in the Arctic Circle and July is shaping up as Earth’s hottest month since recordkeeping began in 1880, Americans are becoming more keenly aware of global warming. They increasingly recognize the need to reduce burning fossil fuels that generate heat-trapping greenhouse gases.
It might come as a shock, then, that oil companies are still allowed to pull billions of cubic feet of natural gas from the ground and simply set it on fire.
The process is called flaring — the burning at the wellhead of unwanted natural gas, principally methane, that’s a byproduct of oil extraction. It’s a shameful waste in the United States, where oil field flaring increased by 48% from 2017 to 2018 and is rising precipitously this year.
Each day, flaring in the shale oil fields of North Dakota and South Texas squanders 1.15 billion cubic feet of natural gas, the analytics firm Rystad Energy estimates. That’s the equivalent of powering 4 million homes or driving nearly 5 million cars for a day.
At night from outer space, burning in the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota rivals the lights of Chicago.
Flaring natural gas can be necessary where safety is concerned, to reduce the chances of accidental fire. But more and more, state regulators are granting flaring permits simply because there’s nowhere to pipe the natural gas, for which there’s a market glut.
In one flagrant case, a drilling firm in Texas with access to pipelines is still seeking to burn off the gas rather than pay the pipeline fee. If the state regulator, the Railroad Commission of Texas, denied the flaring request, which is being opposed by the pipeline operator, it would be a first. In seven years, the commission has received 27,000 flaring requests and has never said no, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The driller, Exco Operating Co., made a classic Catch-22 argument: Better to waste natural gas by burning than “waste” oil by leaving it in the ground.
Apart from granting flaring permits, regulators also lack resources to properly monitor the process. The result can be methane vented directly into the air rather than fully burned. Methane traps 100 times more heat than carbon dioxide.
It’s long past time for the industry and the states to bring sanity to this raging bonfire. In America’s headlong rush to lead the world in oil production — largely through the shale oil fracking boom — growth has outstripped the capacity for wise resource management.
Limits on flaring are needed until pipeline infrastructure can handle what’s pumped out of the ground. To discourage wasteful burning in the meantime, taxes on natural gas production could be extended to flared gas in Texas and elsewhere.
Weaning the world off fossil fuels in the decades ahead will be hard enough without the profligate nonsense of pulling hydrocarbons from the ground just to set them on fire.