Oil industry wastes $40 billion per year by "flaring" gas
This is incredible: a study conducted by NOAA has concluded that the practice of "flaring" natural gas (burning it at the outlet of an oil well) wastes an amount of gas worth $40 billion per year, resulting in an unnecessary annual injection of 400 million tons of extra carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That equals half the current CO2 emissions from Germany, or 13 percent of all the CO2 reductions mandated by the Kyoto Protocol, all of it burned at the well for no good reason. The huge honkin' PDF of the report is here.
The amount of gas wasted every year in this manner is equivalent to 27% of all the natural gas consumed in the US.
Put another way, if oil well operators stopped flaring gas and instead captured it for productive use, this would provide an amount of energy equivalent to all of the current energy used in sub-Saharan Africa.
To make matters worse, some of the natural gas is simply vented, without being burned:
There are also oil fields where gas is simply discharged straight into the atmosphere, which is even worse for the climate, because methane -- the main component in the hydrocarbon mixture known as "natural gas" -- has 20 times the greenhouse-gas or "warming" potential of CO2.
The study was funded by the World Bank, which has an entire initiative devoted to the problem. The head of the initiative, Bent Svensson, notes this:
[O]il prices are so high at the moment, and profits so easy, that no oil company would see a compelling reason to exploit its own wasted gas.
Think about that for a minute: oil and natural gas prices are very high, which means wasting a huge amount of that resource is not only acceptable, it's considered cost-effective. How bizarre.
If the petroleum industry and/or our government had a lick of sense, they'd realize that we could significantly reduce CO2 emissions and improve energy delivery in part by enacting common-sense reforms in our personal and industrial habits. No economic crash is necessary for us to begin slowing the damage we're doing to the environment, and no economic crash is necessary to improve energy delivery around the world.