Environmentalists Alarmed by the Flaring of Natural Gas

Vincent Ricotta

According to an article written by Clifford Krauss, many oil companies are flaring, or burning, natural gas across western North Dakota. With the price of crude oil on the rise, oil companies are rapidly extracting oil to make more money, but they are treating the natural gas, which bubbles up alongside the oil, as a waste. Many oil companies find it to be more profitable to just extract the oil and flare the natural gas because it is expensive to build and maintain pipelines and processing plants to capture and sell the gas. It was stated that more than 100 million ft³ of natural gas is flared every day, which releases about 2 million tons of CO₂ gas into the atmosphere every year. Since there are no federal regulations on flaring natural gas, it becomes very easy for oil companies to proceed doing so. This may be seen as a very controversial topic, which alarms many environmentalists. Even though capturing the gas is the most environmentally safe option, scientists agree that burning the gas is better for the environment than venting the gas into the environment. For instance, pure natural gas is mostly composed of methane, which is capable of trapping heat more effectively than CO₂ gas. Environmentalists are worried that this technique may spread to other states. Fortunately, the EPA has begun to ask oil companies to record data on the amount of emissions from drilling, but they have yet to prohibit the oil companies from flaring the gas.

This topic correlates to many issues that were covered in class. First off, the oil companies are flaring the natural gas due to financial prosperity and lack or government control. As a result, this flaring of gas affects each of the four Earth spheres mentioned in class. As the natural gas is burned, it emits a massive amount of CO₂ gas into the atmosphere, which is a greenhouse gas that leads to global warming. This increase in temperature then affects the geosphere, where temperature of Earth’s crust increases causing the hydrosphere to melt or evaporate and harsh living conditions for the biosphere. As mentioned in class, global warming can melt the polar ice caps and increase the ocean levels drastically enough that current coastal zones would eventually submerge, causing humans and animals on land to retreat to land that they are not adapted to. However, I do agree with the scientists noted in the article that flaring the gas is better than venting the gas into the atmosphere because the methane composed in natural gas has greater global warming potential than does CO₂. Personally, I believe that there should be federal restrictions on the emission of CO₂ with oil companies and that there should also be restrictions prohibiting oil companies from drilling oil if they cannot capture and maintain the natural gas in their oil wells (zero emissions). I mean, as much as I love my gas guzzling 10 mpg Jeep, I believe that the government should put more money towards fuel alternatives, such as, biodiesel, solar power, and especially fuel cells. All in all, if we burn less fuels rich in carbon, we can prevent the greenhouse effect and global climate change.

NOTE: Article cited from

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/27/business/energy-environment/in-north-dakota-wasted-natural-gas-flickers-against-the-sky.html?_r=3&hp