SAN ANTONIO (AP) — No region in Texas has burned off and wasted as much natural gas while obtaining oil as in rural South Texas’ Eagle Ford Shale, an area that has a shortage of pipelines to transport the gas to processing plants, a newspaper analysis shows.
Oil and gas companies rushing to drill in the Eagle Ford since 2009 have burned and wasted billions of cubic feet of natural gas - enough to meet the heating and cooking needs of about 335,000 Texas homes for a year, the San Antonio Express-News (https://bit.ly/1t4usJA ) reported.
“Nobody wants to flare,” said Barry Smitherman, chairman of the Railroad Commission of Texas, which regulates the oil and gas industry. “When you do that, you’re burning up money.”
A yearlong investigation by the newspaper used Texas data to show how often natural gas is being squandered, finding that it’s reached levels not seen in decades.
While flaring is supposed to incinerate impurities in raw natural gas and produce carbon dioxide, some of the wasted fossil fuel simply is being vented - unburned - directly into the atmosphere. The vented gas is mostly methane, a greenhouse gas that traps 20 times as much heat as carbon dioxide does in the earth’s atmosphere.
The database lumped flaring and venting numbers together. While officials know the total volume, they don’t know how much gas has been burned into carbon dioxide, and how much has been released into the air as methane.
The newspaper found that since the early days of the energy boom in 2009, statewide flaring and venting in Texas surged by 400 percent to 33 billion cubic feet in 2012. Nearly two-thirds of the gas lost in 2012 - 21 billion cubic feet - came from the Eagle Ford. The rate of Eagle Ford flaring was 10 times higher than the combined rate of the state’s other oil fields.
The newspaper also found that seven Eagle Ford operations with some of the highest amounts of flaring had failed to obtain the necessary permits from the agency.
Texas regulators blame the cheap price of natural gas for the spike in flaring, and said the plummeting cost of the fossil fuel in recent years hampered pipeline construction.
Smitherman said the waste of any natural resource is a serious problem. But he emphasized most Eagle Ford gas still is being collected. He predicted energy producers will have a bigger incentive to build pipelines as gas prices rise.
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Information from: San Antonio Express-News, https://www.mysanantonio.com
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