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 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
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