Capturing wellhead gases for profit and a cleaner environment

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https://news.berkeley.edu/2023/11/13/capturing-wellhead-gases-for-profit-and-a-cleaner-environment

By Robert Sanders, UC Berkeley News.

Excerpt: Burning of natural gas at oil and gas wells, called flaring, is a major waste of fossil fuels and a contributor to climate change. But to date, capturing the flared natural gas, estimated at some 140 billion cubic meters per year by the International Energy Agency, has not been economically feasible. University of California, Berkeley, chemists have now come up with a simple and green way to convert these gases — primarily methane and ethane — into economically valuable liquids, mostly alcohols like methanol and ethanol. The liquids are also easier to store. The alcohols can be used as feedstocks for production of numerous other petrochemical products, providing an additional revenue source for oil and gas companies but also lowering carbon dioxide emissions from flaring. Flaring is used to mitigate the more harmful effects of directly venting natural gas — methane is 34 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide — into the atmosphere. Details of the process were published Nov. 2 in the journal Science....

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