I always see burning flame on a pole on an Oil Platform. Can’t they store and then sell it?
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It’s some problematic byproduct of the mining process that isn’t present in enough volume to be worth shipping to land (pipelines and ship trips are expensive), but would be even worse to just release. IIRC it’s usually pockets of methane or natural gas in the case of oil drilling. They are way worse greenhouse cases than the CO2 they burn into, so they light them on fire before releasing.
It is one of two things. It is gases like methane or propane that have leaked/escaped out of the system that are being burnt off because the co2 is better for the atmosphere than the methane.
Or, the gases haven’t leaked, but they’re still being intentionally burnt off because it isn’t worth the effort to compress it, store it, and ship it
When they drill for oil they hit pockets of gas so they burn it off on those ” poles” ypu see rather then let it escape up into the rig where it could caue an explosion……Ex oil rig worker.
It’s called flaring. As people below have said it can be done to dispose of the relatively small amounts of gas produced alongside oil where it would be too expensive to transport it ashore where it is called ‘routine flaring’.
‘Safety flaring’ is done to reduce gas pressure during oil exploration when sudden spikes in pressure are often encountered during drilling.
Worldwide, it adds up to a serious amount of gas – about 350 million tonnes of CO2 each year. Gas flaring in the Arctic and northern oceans has also been linked to ice melting because the dirty flames produce huge amounts of fine carbon particles which settle on the ice, absorb sunlight and accelerate warming. In other places, particular carbon and some of the nasty heavy hydrocarbons released by flaring have been linked to a wide range of human health problems.
There are various schemes to reduce flaring. The North Sea has seen a huge reduction with Norway banning routine flaring as far back as 1971. There’s a nice explanation of it all here:
https://www.worldbank.org/en/programs/gasflaringreduction/gas-flaring-explained
Most of the answers here are correct. It’s used to get rid negligible amounts of gas products during normal operations, or large amounts during emergency situations. The pole is called a “flare boom”.
Flaring methane – if it can’t be sent somewhere it is burned as CO2 causes a lot less climate impact than the methane would.
Also done on some land installations, e.g. in southwest Texas and the ethylene cracker at Mossmorran, Scotland.
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