Natural Gas Flaring in Iraq

In 2012, as Iraq was ramping up production of crude oil, Iraq flared an estimated 9 billion cubic metres of associated gas, ranking it among the top five flaring nations in the world, according to the Word Bank. The gas being flared was enough to fuel all of Iraq's electric power needs and, according to advisor Fabrice Mosneron Dupin, the wasted gas itself is worth around $5 million per day. Of the 1,838 million cubic feet (mcf) per day of natural gas produced in the second half of 2012, an average of 1,253 million (68%) was flared.

As of 2012 Iraqi laws and regulations allowed flaring of natural gas and by contract, oil field operators were not compensated for gas produced in association with crude oil, thus "incentivising" flaring activities. However the South Gas Project, a joint venture between the Oil Ministry and oil major Shell was intended to address the problem by capturing and utilising associated gas from a number of souther oil fields. In 2012 Shell announced that the preliminary work it had done in capturing associated gas in Basra cut down flaring by around 20 percent.

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