Gas flare
[6] In a practice known as production flaring, they may also be used to dispose of large amounts of unwanted associated petroleum gas, possibly throughout the life of an oil well.
[7] When industrial plant equipment items are overpressured, the pressure relief valve is an essential safety device that automatically releases gases and sometimes liquids.
When too much steam is added, a condition known as "oversteaming" can occur resulting in reduced combustion efficiency and higher emissions.
They are generally used onshore in environmentally sensitive areas and have been used offshore on floating production storage and offloading installations (FPSOs).
Preferably, associated gas is reinjected into the reservoir, which saves it for future use while maintaining higher well pressure and crude oil producibility.
In this latter case, generation of biogas cannot normally be interrupted, and a gas flare is employed to maintain the internal pressure on the biological process.
Open flares burn at a lower temperature, less than 1000 °C and are generally cheaper than enclosed flares that burn at a higher combustion temperature and are usually supplied to conform to a specific residence time of 0.3s within the chimney to ensure complete destruction of the toxic elements contained within the biogas.
Therefore, to the extent that gas flares convert methane to CO2 before it is released into the atmosphere, they reduce the amount of global warming that would otherwise occur.
Additional noxious fumes emitted by flaring may include, aromatic hydrocarbons (benzene, toluene, xylenes) and benzo(a)pyrene, which are known to be carcinogenic.
Approximately 7,500 migrating songbirds were attracted to and killed by the flare at the liquefied natural gas terminal in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada on September 13, 2013.
Over the course of the months and years that the refinery was running a vast number of moths must have been killed, suggesting that plants could not be pollinated over a large area of forest".
According to one study from 2020, pregnant women living near flaring natural gas and oil wells have reportedly experienced a 50% greater premature birth rate.
