The photo is sourced from sagemetering.com
The Middle East accounts for the largest share of APG flaring worldwide at 31.2%. The region’s top flarers are Iran and Iraq, whose shares in the global volume of associated gas flaring are significantly higher than that of Saudi Arabia (12.5% and 12.1% versus 1.7%, respectively). At the same time, Saudi Arabia is greatly outstripping Iran and Iraq in terms of its share in global oil production (12.9% versus 4.1% and 4.8%, respectively). This is the result of Saudi Arabia’s efforts to develop infrastructure for the processing of associated gas, from which ethane, propane, butane and isobutane are extracted for the subsequent production of liquefied petroleum gases (LPG) and polymers. For instance, Saudi Aramco ramped up its gas processing capacity from 56 million cubic metres per day (m3/d) in 2000 to 504 million m3/d in 2020.
Africa ranks second among the leading regions, accounting for 20.0% of global APG flaring in 2022. Algeria was the continent’s top flarer (8.5 billion cubic metres out of 29.3 billion cubic metres), although until recently the top position had been occupied by Nigeria, which flared 5.3 billion cubic metres of APG in 2022 (against 12.9 billion cubic metres in 2012). In effect, Nigeria’s progress has been largely caused by oil production decline, which reached 40% in the past decade (dropping from 2.40 million bpd to 1.45 million bpd in the period from 2012 to 2022), including due to the problem of unauthorised pipeline tie-ins.
The region that placed third in terms of global APG flaring was the former USSR, where the volume of flaring reached 28.8 billion cubic metres, of which 26 billion cubic metres were flared in the Russian Federation. Russia’s APG flaring volume in 2022 was almost 1.5 times higher than the volume recorded in 2012 (17.8 billion cubic metres). To a large extent, this considerable growth can be attributed to the increased role of Eastern Siberia and Russia’s Far East in the country’s oil production, although these regions are still lagging behind Western Siberia when it comes to well-developed infrastructure for useful utilisation of APG.
