The National Iranian Oil Company is implementing plans to reduce gas flaring in various oil and gas fields, the director of NIOC’s Health, Safety and Environment Department said.
“With the efforts made in the past few years, the number of gas flares has been lowered from 1,700 to 675 at present,” Abbas Razmi was also quoted as saying by IRNA.
The operation of new fields is good news, as they add to the country’s oil and gas production capacity, but the gas flares should be controlled or they will pollute the region with their emissions, he added.
Although difficult, it is possible to collect the associated petroleum gases (APG) burned at the flares and make better use of them.
“We are dealing with sour gas in our offshore oilfields in Asalouyeh, Kharg, Sirri, Lavan and other oil-rich regions, and the release of hydrogen sulfide gas is a serious issue,” he added.
A chemical compound, hydrogen sulfide is a colorless chalcogen-hydride gas, and is poisonous, corrosive and flammable, with trace amounts in ambient atmosphere having a characteristic foul odor of rotten eggs.
Areas in nature where this can occur are low oxygen environments such as swamps and polluted water. H2S also forms as a part of natural gas, petroleum, sour crude oil (oil with more than 0.05% sulfur content), sulfur deposits, volcanic gases and sulfur springs.
APG collection has been a concern for four decades and now the Oil Ministry is doing all it can to reduce it as much as possible, Razmi said.
Since 2008, Iran has prevented the flaring of 12 billion cubic meters of APG, a source of global warming and wastage of valuable fuel. Nonetheless, the country remains one of the top three states with the highest APG flaring rate.
A Priority
Collecting APG from oil and gas fields is a priority of the Oil Ministry in the framework of the policy to safeguard the environment, curb the loss of national wealth and create jobs.
APG is natural gas found with deposits of petroleum. Flaring pours methane, ethane and propane into the atmosphere and contributes to air pollution.
Based on the National Iranian Oil Company data, daily gas flaring in 2017 was 50 million cubic meters that dropped below 30 mcm/d in 2019. In 2018, it was 40 mcm/d with a $5 billion net loss for the treasury because the gas could have been used alternately for economic benefit such as power generation.
Flaring deprives countries of economic benefit from using gas associated with pumping crude oil, rather than releasing it into the air and worsening air pollution.
According to a law passed in 2017, the government is obliged to curb the flaring of natural gas to 10% or lower by 2023 and several plans have either been completed or are in the implementation phase.
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.
