Natural Gas Flaring

OK, so I am on a roll today and will keep posting until I lose the momentum. This post is about natural gas flaring, which I had heard of and was only minimally aware of but I have been reading about it this morning. Here is a brief description I found in an article from Oilwatch Africa, it is an article linked in the previous blog from today:

WHAT IS GAS FLARING?
*Geology dictates that some of the richest deposits of oil sit together with deposits of natural gas. Gas flaring is the practice of burning off that natural gas when it is brought to the surface in places where there is no infrastructure to make use of it. In the 1960s and 70s, "worthless" gas was continuously flared at oil wells from Texas to Saudi Arabia. At its peak, the practice pumped about 110 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere each year — about 0.5 per cent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions.
Since then, the practice has been reduced, largely because companies have realised the commercial potential of the gas. Pressure to reduce flaring increased again when negative impacts of burning the gas became better understood and efforts began to reduce the CO2 emissions driving climate change. However, flaring is commonplace in Nigeria, where an estimated 40 per cent of gas produced is burned off – about 2.5 billion standard cubic feet per day. Worldwide, the gas lost to flaring could meet one third of the EU's natural gas needs each year.

Here is a little more information about flaring.