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Just over 1.2 million tonnes of gas (about 3.5 million tonnes of CO
2
e) were flared on the UKCS last year, a 7 per cent
increase on 2014 due to the 10.4 per cent rise in production.
Flare gas is reported under EEMS as either routine, maintenance, process upsets, well testing or gross
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. Gross
is reported when a breakdown is not available and could therefore be any of the other categories; the majority
falls into this category, as shown in Figure 12. When excluding gross, routine flaring accounts for the greatest
proportion of emissions in each year.
Figure 12: Breakdown of Gas Flaring by Source
0
200,000
400,000
600,000
800,000
1,000,000
1,200,000
1,400,000
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
Total Gas Flared (Tonnes)
Gross
Maintenance
Routine
Upsets/Other
Well Testing
Source: EEMS July 2016
Analysis of the EEMS data indicates that the majority of flaring between 2010 and 2015 took place in the central
North Sea (CNS) and northern North Sea (NNS) at 37 per cent and 53 per cent by mass, respectively. This is likely
because of the greater proportion of larger and older oil-producing platforms in these regions that were designed
to flare gas from the reservoir during production. Breaking this down further, the 52 installations on the UKCS that
are aged between 31 to 40 years old flared over 36 per cent of the total gas between 2010 and 2015. Retrospective
changes to these platforms’ design would be very costly and are likely to render them uneconomic.
Installations brought on-stream in the last ten years in new regions such as the west of Shetland (W o S) have
much lower levels of flaring, accounting for less than 14 per cent of the total, while the oldest gas platforms in the
southern North Sea (SNS) accounted for just over 3 per cent of the total gas flared.
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See
http://bit.ly/AGNgov1
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