Environment Report 2016

Just over 1.2 million tonnes of gas (about 3.5 million tonnes of CO 2 increase on 2014 due to the 10.4 per cent rise in production.

e) were flared on the UKCS last year, a 7 per cent

1

Flare gas is reported under EEMS as either routine, maintenance, process upsets, well testing or gross 35 . 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.

2

Figure 12: Breakdown of Gas Flaring by Source

3

Gross

Maintenance

Routine

Upsets/Other

Well Testing

1,400,000

4

1,200,000

1,000,000

5

800,000

600,000

6

Total Gas Flared (Tonnes)

400,000

200,000

7

0

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

Source: EEMS July 2016

8

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.

35 See http://bit.ly/AGNgov

25