Maroon Oil and Gas Exploitation Company has been collecting associate petroleum gas from Maroun Oilfield in Khuzestan Province to reduce harmful emissions through the recovery and utilization of the flare gas, managing director of Maroun Oil and Gas Production Company said.
“With the help of the private sector, we collect 453,000 cubic meters of flare gas per day. This amount has brought gas flaring in Maroun 6 Oilfield in the southwestern province to zero,” Hamid Kaviyan was quoted as saying by the Oil Ministry’s news agency Shana.
The APG is transferred to the production line in Maroun Petrochemical Company, he added.
Maroun Oilfield is the second-largest oilfield of Iran. Discovered in 1963, the field contains estimated recoverable oil reserves of 22 billion barrels, making it the world's sixth biggest onshore oilfield. It is currently producing approximately 520,000 barrels per day of crude oil.
Flaring is the burning of natural gas that cannot be currently processed or sold. Flaring of APG is an important safety measure at oil and gas production sites, as it prevents industrial plant equipment from over-pressuring and exploding. However, burning high levels of APG is a major source of air pollution.
Iran has the highest rate of energy waste in the form of APG in the Middle East and ranks third in the world in terms of gas flaring after Russia and Nigeria.
Optimizing energy consumption and reducing environmental pollutants are major concerns in the oil and gas industries. As the only known way to curb energy waste and emission of pollutants in the oil and gas industry is flaring, an effective mechanism to curtail and eliminate flare is crucial.
The collected gas can be utilized in a number of ways after processing: It can be sold and used in the natural-gas distribution networks, used for on-site electricity generation with engines or turbines, reinjected for secondary recovery and used in enhanced oil recovery, converted from gas-to-liquids for producing synthetic fuels, or used as feedstock in the petrochemical industry.
According to a World Bank report, a massive amount of gas flares at oil production sites around the world burn approximately 140 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually, emitting more than 300 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
If this amount of gas is used for power generation, it can provide about 750 billion kilowatts per hour of electricity, or more than the African continent’s current annual electricity consumption.
