MUSCAT: The Sultanate of Oman is among a number of oil producing nations that have been cited by the World Bank’s Global Gas Flaring Reduction Partnership (GGFR) for their contribution to worldwide efforts to curb flaring – a phenomenon that fuels global warming and climate change.
Flaring, typically involving the burning of natural gas associated with oil extraction, declined by 0.4 billion cubic metres (bcm) over the 2021-2022 timeframe in Oman, on the back of flaring mitigation and utilization initiatives adopted by energy companies in recent years.
The Washington-based GGFR Partnership ranks Oman among the top 30 gas flaring countries in the world, although its flared volumes are nowhere near those of top-ranked nations Russia, Iraq, Iran and the United States.
According to the GGFR Partnership report, flared volumes fell by 5 bcm to 139 bcm globally – its lowest level since 2010 – underscoring efforts by energy producers to move away from flaring and into more environmentally-friendly practices of harnessing and utilizing flared volumes for energy generation or fuel production.
Three countries - Nigeria, Mexico, and the US – were credited with contributing the most to flaring reduction in 2022. In particular, Kazakhstan and Colombia were lauded for consistently reducing flaring volumes in the last seven years.
Significantly, in addition to the overall reduction in flare volume, global flaring intensity—the amount of flaring per barrel of oil produced— also fell to its lowest level since satellite data monitoring began. “This indicates a gradual and sustained decoupling of oil production from flaring,” the GGFR Partnership said in a report. It added that nine countries - Russia, Iraq, Iran, Algeria, Venezuela, United States, Mexico, Libya, and Nigeria -- accounted for nearly three-quarters of flared volumes in 2022.
In Oman, all of the leading operators have pledged to gradually pare their flared volumes per specific timelines with the ultimate goal of achieving zero flaring by 2050 – in conjunction with Oman’s Net Zero target.
Petroleum Development Oman (PDO), the nation’s biggest oil and gas producer, reported a 22 per cent decline in flared gas volumes in 2021 as part of its commitment to the World Bank’s ‘Zero Routine Flaring By 2030’ initiative. This was enabled by, among other factors, the commissioning of flaring reduction projects and gas recovery schemes at a number of the company’s oilfields.
Furthermore, in support of the GGFR Partnership, well-known Omani oilfield services contractor Special Oilfield Services announced last May the launch of a Gas-to-Liquids (GTL) project that would convert flared gas and stranded gas into synthetic liquids such as crude oil and diesel. A 100 barrels per day (bpd) plant has the capacity to process 1 million standard cubic feet per day (SCFD) of flared or stranded gas into synthetic fuels, it said.
According to the latest GGFR report, gas flaring resulted in the release of a staggering 357 million tonnes of CO2 equivalents, which included 42 million tonnes of methane, another greenhouse gas, in 2022.
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