From Volker Mrasek at Germany's Der Spiegel, more proof that doing what's right for the environment and making buckets of cash aren't incompatible at all. Also, I suppose, strong evidence that the opposite can be true -- the obscene environmental inefficiency on display by the oil companies here is costing them billions of dollars a month.
The technique used to gather the information on "gas flaring" data is really pretty neat:
To build a world atlas of oil-industry wasted emissions, the NOAA used American satellite data from the years 1995 to 2006. Cameras shot wide photos of the earth's surface from an altitude of 700 km (435 miles), in the spectrum of both visible and infrared light. Analysts built their numbers by studying only night photographs from a cloudless sky.
Russia is by far the number one offender, burning "around 50 billion cubic meters of gas... one third of the world's total." Mrasek says that number "is several times the 15 billion cubic meters reported by Russia three years ago." Not surprising, nor are the other countries on the "hit list": Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, China... Iraq.
Maybe the most telling analysis comes from Bent Svensson, head of the Global Gas Flaring Reduction Initiative at the World Bank. It points both to the market failure that's allowing this horrific wastefulness to continue, and to a possible solution, if only in broad strokes:
...Svensson knows oil prices are so high at the moment, and profits so easy, that no oil company would see a compelling reason to exploit its own wasted gas. The technology would be attractive in developing nations, though, where the Kyoto Protocol's so-called Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) applies. When a given project fulfills CDM standards and proves it has reduced greenhouse emissions, its leaders collect CO2 certificates, which they can sell on the emissions trading market.
Here's hoping someone out there in cap-and-trade land is paying attention.