Flare gas co-gen

I used to live in Houston (9 years) and agree with you. I did many projects for those refineries and mentioned that to the on-site process engineers. The only answer I got was that the fuel in those stacks was typically not steady enough to properly run a reliable burner.

Now, to me anyway, that sounded like a good excuse to not actually engineer a solution. I always thought that with a knock-out drum (which most flares have anyway) and some sort of compressor with the ability to by-pass, one could put together a system that would use those wastes as fuel.

It would of course require some way to bypass the entire thing for an emergency release - which is the point of most of those systems. As I think about it, this might be the Achilles of this problem. How to you have an absolutely reliable venting / release point for an emergency if you are trying to collect and burn those small flows (relative to an emergency release) that we typically see flaring at night.

I hope you find a good answer here, because this problem is not just restricted to the Houston area, but to all refineries and to many other facilities as well.

Stephan