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Comment by wmil | Hacker News Reader

Worse, oil wells frequently flame off natural gas because it's not economical to capture it from those wells.

So there are layers of waste.

It's still better to flare it than to vent it without flaring [0]. In Texas there's a huge problem of wells venting without flaring that's been documented by some groups with IR cameras [1].

[0]: https://www.energy.gov/fecm/articles/natural-gas-flaring-and...

[1]: https://youtu.be/y4eDlG9U25c

> It's still better to flare it than to vent it without flaring [0].

Yes, though that's just because methane is itself 2 orders of magnitude worse for the environment than carbon dioxide, not because combustion itself is actually good.

if combustion removes 99% of the methane's global warming potential, what would count as 'actually good' in your eyes?

(or if you mean combustion in the abstract, not in this particular situation, keep in mind that aerobic respiration is combustion; without combustion the only life forms that would continue to exist would be anaerobic bacteria)

This still becomes another CO2 emission that is unnecessary. Depending on the quantity of CO2 being emitted by this combustion compared to simply requiring the methane to be captured, it’s still bad. It’s still CO2 emissions.

be careful about trying to decide what's necessary for other people; they may decide that the carbon dioxide emission of your breathing is unnecessary, and that it would be better to permanently sequester your carbon

maybe you think that you, or people like you, are the ones who would be making the decisions about what is necessary and what is unnecessary. that is a dangerously naïve viewpoint; power and coercion have their own logic

Maybe they are clearly differentiating deep sequested carbon from gas wells from surface carbon cycles and not making veiled threats and muddy sophistry.

it is true that the threat tayloralexander was making was not at all veiled

The “threat” that a government might regulate the operations of a corporation is not a threat at all, that’s a very normal policy discussion. Your suggestion that I am inviting threats against people is an fantasy and unrelated to this discussion.

certainly discussing whether liberalism or authoritarianism is better is a very normal policy discussion, but that doesn't mean that advocating authoritarianism isn't threatening. it's far more threatening than simply pointing a gun at someone. and when governments start prohibiting things because they're not necessary you have descended pretty far into authoritarianism; you're in north korea 'illegal microwave oven' and 'unapproved haircut' territory

how many of the things you did today were necessary?

even if the answer is more than zero, that's probably only because you interpreted 'necessary' as 'necessary to taylor alexander'. but you can rest assured that an authoritarian government will not interpret it that way unless you are the head of state

I’m sorry but this is nonsense. If corporations burning methane is an alternative to capturing it then from an engineering perspective those emissions are not strictly necessary - that is, a solution exists which would not require those emissions. Regulators could decide to require this capture equipment. The potential down side would be costs to operators which must be considered.

This has absolutely nothing to do with deciding who is allowed to breathe and to suggest otherwise is absurd.

The wells could be capturing the natural gas for productive combustion. Or just leaving it underground. The wells didn’t build themselves.

The gas that is flared comes with oil production. Good idea to capture it for productive use, but if you want the oil you have to deal with the gas. Unlike oil where you can move small amounts of it via truck, you need a pipeline to the wellhead to move natural gas to market. Expensive to do locally and very hard to build new, long distance pipelines to bring it to market in states not called Texas.

Sorry, if they flare it, that means they channel it through a chimney, so why is it expensive to collect it?

It's my understanding that harvesting the gasses is a more complex and involved process than burning them off. The gear and infrastructure is expensive, even if you have something in place for flaring, therefore it normally isn't done for smaller wells.

There's interesting work being done to make some forms of wellhead capture more feasible though.

https://news.berkeley.edu/2023/11/13/capturing-wellhead-gase...

Two main reasons AFIK: unstable output (high volume burst but little to no output most of the time) and chemical composition which would require further refining before the gas can be sold.

The challenging is getting the gas from a remote well location to a plant where it can be processed. This requires pipelines, gas gathering facilities, etc. If any of that infrastructure is experiencing an upset condition, the operator has to choose between shutting in the well or flaring the gas. Shutting in the well can be undesirable because it's still producing oil to tanks, and oil is where most of the profit is from. A shut-down well can also be hard to get going again.

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