Flaring in the refinery is under upset conditions to alleviate the pressure from excess hydrocarbons which need to be vented. Much better to burn it into CO2 at the source rather than releasing flammable, toxic hydrocarbons directly into the atmosphere. Where the carbon content in the form of unburned methane would end up acting as a much more severe climate stressor for the period of time it takes to naturally become oxidized into CO2 eventually anyway, from which point the carbon then remains in the atmosphere as the more familiar CO2. Either way the same amount of CO2 is building up and not going away on its own.
Each decade you go back, refineries were more commonly flaring routinely, it can be so uncommon now that unfamiliar new residents who have crowded into these towns can be completely astonished by the noise and brightness all night sometimes when it does happen.
But in the oil field however, flaring can be an ordinary operational procedure. How would you feel if you had an oil well out in the middle of nowhere and it produced a decent enough amount of oil to pay for the liquid handling & transportation, but the natural gas that comes up with the oil is not worth enough money to even begin to pay for the gas-handling infrastructure? Namely pipelines which can be many miles to a gas gathering area if there is one within reach, but even the combined oil & gas from that well might not be able to cover it.
Either way flaring is just for waste gas in the refinery, and a waste of gas in the oil field. If this gas were to be recovered instead of wasting it, it would be beneficial to those wanting to use it in their gas stoves and heaters, but it would still end up as the same amount of CO2 in the atmosphere afterward anyway, even if none were wasted at all. Of course they wouldn't even drill that many oil wells if the consumers weren't as enthusiastic about the products, something about supply & demand but that's above my pay grade ;)
Could be that the idea of banning flaring was intended to reduce the carbon getting into the atmosphere, but there is no provision about what to do with the gas otherwise. Plus maybe the "best available technology" may be considered acceptable, and it looks like the "internal combustion" flare-replacement hardware was about off-the-shelf already, probably to allow refineries to flare more discreetly without disturbing their neighbors.
So if you've got an oil well that needs to flare more discreetly, there's probably a salesman who wants to talk with you. There's a whole lot more oil fields than there are refineries, could be a lot of incentive there. Might even be enough incentive to do a little political lobbying. Who knows?
I don't have the data in front of me regarding the infrared wavelengths, resolution, bandwidth, and sensitivity from overhead, but I expect that the heat signature of conventional flares is more easily detected than the specific detection of either methane or CO2 concentrations coming from suspect facilities.
Which could be a complaint giving rise to the type of article here.
