Flare fire??

There are a wide variety of source for flare gas. In a refinery or a gas plant, flare gas can come from over pressure of systems resulting in the safety valves lifting and directing the over pressure to the flare. The leakage from seals on compressors and pumps also often goes to flare. Other leak gas may go to flare as well.

Many refineries are now installing flare gas recovery compressors in order to reclaim that gas rather than allow it to go to flare. In oil production facilities vapor recovery compressors serve a similar purpose.

I often wondered why they flare at all? It makes absolutely no sense and as energy becomes more and more a discussion point, it would not harm their image to be seen to recycle instead of just burn it off to warm the crows.

Good to hear they now collect it for other purposes as well.

I'm sure steve or petro could elaborate in more detail.

Safety, to keep from having dangerous qty's of combustble gases from acculating, flare em off

as these relatively small qty's become worth enough $'s to pay for the infrastructure this changes

As the prices go up, the quantity at which it becomes profitable goes down.

Also don't forget the image these guys have. They earn gazillion bucks per millisecond and there goes another flare! Does not look good in consumer relations perspective as those beardies will have a field day out of it.

Yeh you right

$100/bbl oil changes the equation

Oil/Hydrocarbon Liquids processing facilities may flare off gas from storage vessels, just like the power plant but they may also flare off gas containing sulphur if the raw liquid contains sulphur. Gas processing plants typically flare off a much lighter gas but it may also contain sulphur if the inlet gas is sour.

Smoke is the un-burned carbon condensing out of the flame envelope. It returns to a solid and falls to ground as soot.

In steel mill operations, excess Blast Furnace Gas (off gases from the blast furnace) is either used for fuel (for example in underfiring coke oven batteries or supplying other fuel users) or it will be flared. Due to the low BTU content of this gas, usually < 60 BTU/SCF, huge volumes are often discharged to flare stacks.

case,

In most refineries and chem plants the idea is not to flare, a flare really should be an abnormal condition.

There are safety valves all over such plants to provide safe relief for over pressure situations in order to prevent an explosion. When you see a flare really going, (say a 30 meter flame) that is either an emergency pressure relief, or a system being deinventoried for maintenance, and they had no where else to put the gas but the flare.

When you drive by a plant and you see a small flame going all the time, that is typically due to process equipment that is leaking gas, and that leak gas is going to the flare. In the US there are regulations on how much and how long you can do that, so that is part of the reason why flare gas recovery is becoming popular.

In oil field equipment the flare is often due to off gassing of the oil in storage, or gas that has come up with the oil, but as I said there is a lot of investing in recovering that as well. The problem is that a lot of oil fields have no where to put the gas (no pipeline) so it either is pumped back into the ground, or flared.

Unfortunatly a lot of hydrocarbons have been flared in oil fields all over the world for decades for the simple reason that there was no market for it, and thus no pipeline to move it. That has certainly changed!

Zero flaring is the goal, as stated by Steve S. Even in places like Nigeria the oil companies have been told to have zero flaring by I think 2010. The local women are not too keen on it because they dry cassava and tapioca in the heat of the ground flares.

You will always see a small flame at the top of the flare even when nothing is leaking, this is the pilot flame and has to be there in order to guarantee that the flare lights if there is an upset.