Genevieve Plant: Methane emissions from US natural gas flares

Slides

https://drive.google.com/file/d/11cdXipy3iVXrdvPNYnI2BDWXC4cPM6d4/view?usp=share_link

Abstract

Flaring is a common practice used in the oil and gas industry to dispose of unwanted natural gas. Current accounting for methane emissions from flares generally rely on default assumptions that the flares remain lit and destroy methane in the gas with a high efficiency of 98%. As part of the Flaring and Fossil Fuels: Uncovering Losses and Emissions (F3UEL) project, we directly sampled real-world flares across the three regions responsible for >80% of US flaring: the Bakken, Eagle Ford, and Permian. From our in-situ airborne measurements, we estimate flare methane destruction removal efficiencies and find they follow a skewed distribution, with a number of flares operating below 98% efficiency. Combining this observed combustion performance with unlit flare prevalence surveys, we find that both unlit flares and inefficient combustion contribute comparably to ineffective methane destruction at the basin-scale. The resulting average effective methane destruction removal efficiency is around 91%. This lower effective efficiency leads to a significant increase in the accounting for methane from US flares, but also highlights a previously underappreciated methane source and mitigation opportunity.

Bio

Genevieve Plant is an Assistant Research Scientist in the department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering at the University of Michigan. Dr. Plant received her B.S. from Boston University in 2011 and her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2016, both in Electrical Engineering. Her interests include the development and deployment of high precision trace-gas instrumentation for measurement of greenhouse gases. Recently, her work has focused on quantifying sources of methane in cities and along the oil and gas supply chain with data-driven methods based on airborne and satellite observations.