What is worse than burning off fuel / wasting the energy and releasing the carbon? Releasing the methane directly which has a GHG effect 15-35 times worse than C02.
Oh, so you are going to legislate that all of the gas is captured, transported and moved to market and then used in all instances? Now your legislation just got SUPER expensive and SUPER complicated. And/or a bunch of rigs would just not be built, given that in so many instances gases are co-existing with the liquid which is the target resource.
Realistically, legislating a carbon tax and a removal of direct and indirect subsidies would not just be significantly cheaper, but also much more simple and way more politically palatable. (but as we can see, still very difficult and non-trivial).
> a bunch of rigs would just not be built, given that in so many instances gases are co-existing with the liquid which is the target resource.
Yeah, that's a feature not a bug. Carbon-taxing the methane flaring would be a decent compromise to start with though, but I'm not sure whether it would be pricey enough to make a difference and (as you point out) it's quite easy to evade when flaring gas at the point of production.
It's also a strangely non-joined-up market when one set of people are performing fracking specifically to get at the gas and another set of people are flaring it as a worthless byproduct. Perhaps there should be a moratorium on gas exploration until it's not worthless?
(A key point to remember in exploration: just because it's there doesn't mean it has to be extracted now. Obviously the individual firm is going to want to do it immediately, but for the planet as a whole or even the individual extracting country the priority is not the same)
What is worse than burning off fuel / wasting the energy and releasing the carbon? Releasing the methane directly which has a GHG effect 15-35 times worse than C02.
Oh, so you are going to legislate that all of the gas is captured, transported and moved to market and then used in all instances? Now your legislation just got SUPER expensive and SUPER complicated. And/or a bunch of rigs would just not be built, given that in so many instances gases are co-existing with the liquid which is the target resource.
Realistically, legislating a carbon tax and a removal of direct and indirect subsidies would not just be significantly cheaper, but also much more simple and way more politically palatable. (but as we can see, still very difficult and non-trivial).