re: Russia flaring off large amounts of natural gas

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Trump tried to tell em

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Sure did. They laughed at him. Wonder if they're laughing now...

Some days it seems to flare all day. Some weeks it's multiple days. At night I have a second sunset.

I guess I knew it was cheaper to burn than store. But why?

Half the country complains about through the roof Nat gas prices.

Is it due to the age of the refineries?

Isnt that wasteful? I guess Americans will have to tighten up now on our use of natural gas, since our govt only likes to punish taxpayers.

I meant the age of the local refineries who refine fuels and have nat gas byproducts.

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Some days it seems to flare all day. Some weeks it's multiple days. At night I have a second sunset.

I guess I knew it was cheaper to burn than store. But why?

Half the country complains about through the roof Nat gas prices.

Is it due to the age of the refineries?

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Are we talking about Norco?

Keep in mind that what you see from a distance in the Norco area is actually multiple plants, primarily Shell Norco (which consists of a chemical plant and a refinery), Valero St. Charles Refinery, and Dow St. Charles - any of which might be flaring at a given point in time for various reasons.

Most of what you see flaring from these plants isn’t natural gas. It’s various streams from the refineries/chemical plants that have nowhere else to go.

The most obvious example would be a scenario in which there’s some type of failure/runaway reaction/etc. that leads to an unsafe operating condition - e.g. overpressure. Safety valves then open to vent the gas to a flare where it can be burned off safely as opposed to an uncontrolled release/explosion otherwise. This is the primary safety purpose of the flare system.

Most of the time when you see flaring for an extended period of time it’s because units are starting up or shutting down. These complexes are highly integrated - unit A feeds unit B which feeds unit C. There’s an order of operations to startup so maybe you need unit A at 50% output before you can start unit B, but you can’t get unit A to 100% output until unit B is up to at least 75% output. It can get complicated. Typically if a plant can run down product to their tank farm for storage while another unit is down, they will. But that’s not always possible.

Example: The hydrotreater and hydrogen plant both go down for maintenance. The hydrogen plant has to start back up first so that the hydrotreater has the hydrogen gas needed to operate. But once the hydrogen plant is up, there’s nowhere for the hydrogen to go until the hydrotreater comes online. So they flare the hydrogen while the hydrotreater starts up. If the hydrotreater runs into problems during startup, the hydrogen plant has to flare for a longer period of time or shut back down (which may cause problems in other units that also require hydrogen).

In upstream O&G, typically a flare means there’s nowhere for the natural gas to go. If an offshore platform’s export gas compressors go down, they have to flare until either A) they get the compressor back online or B) they can safely shut the entire platform down.

In all cases the EPA monitors flare events closely and will penalize companies for flaring longer than allowed under permit, flaring with an incomplete burn (you shouldn’t see any smoke from a flare), etc… so nobody wants to flare any longer than they have to.

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You can see it from Hwy 90 in Des Allemands when they flaring. I think of all the money they just letting burn up.

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every time I see gas being flared like that I try to visualize how many crab, shrimp or crawfish boils that could have been used for.
For sure enough to run a household for a long time.

Surprised they can actually do it competently

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Germany says it was purely a political move following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

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Caves to U.S. pressure to shutdown Nordstream 2 pipeline
When war starts because of it, cries about Nordstream 1 pipeline

Maybe not listen to Dim U.S. politicians and do what the frick is best for your country, not some other country

Vlad doesn't know how to play chess.

Should give it to poor countries and call out the West for not doing it.

All I can tell you is what I know from working for Shell offshore on TLPs. Flare going off on a TLP = something bad happening.