Gas flaring at an Oil Refinery is the process where gas produced during Oil refining is burnt off. In the Nigerian Delta alone in 2001 the amount burnt off was equal to 25% of the total UK natural gas usage.

An even Greater Quantity is actually burnt of at Oil wells .This has been estimated at equal to the combined total Natural Gas usage of France and Germany combined.

To understand A little more here is probably the shortest easiest lesson in how Crude oil is produced.

If you Imagine That Crude oil is actually " Flat cola, " that we want to get from a can of fizzy cola. First we find a safe way to pierce the cola without it going all over the place.

Now we have found a safe way to open it up when we do, the first thing we get is an escape of gas then we get a bubbling liquid coming out of the can.

We take this bubbling liquid then maybe add a drop of vinegar and after all the bubbles have gone we have our flat cola that we wanted.

Associated gas is the real by-product of Crude Refining and as we have just seen it appear's twice during production.

The difference between AGS and Natural gas is AGs is far dirtier, it contains many impurities, which cannot be handled (transported) easily and or cannot be given for consumption, as it is recovered during the oil production process.

Although I have called AGS dirt, it does have many uses's, the oil companies would like us too believe that because of the green campaign highlighting the wastage of gas flaring they have started to do allot to solve this problem. This is true they are but the reason is not a green one it is that the main reason for gas flaring was that the cost of converting AGS to a usable product out weighed the final product. With technology this is changing so now there are lot's of uses's.

Gas re-injection

This is where you pump the gas back into the oil reservoir, as oil is pressure fed this increases the pressure allowing more oil to be extracted, eventually when the oil is depleted you just have a large deposit of AGS which will be far cheaper to convert in one go rather than as a by-product

Conversion to Liquid Nitrogen Gas

As AGS is unsafe to be transported through pipelines it can be converted to LNG for transportation.

Used on site for Electricity generation

This can then be used to power some of the production plant or dependant on the area be used and added to the Countries grid.

these are just a few there are many more

There are many projects world wide currently addressing these issue's in western Europe over 90% of AGS is now being re injected rather than burnt. (well as we the British invented it it sounds good to say that, we fail to mention that as British companies we still burn but in other people's countries)

As Technology improves so does the issue. It is just sad that the motivation behind the action is really one of financial rather than Ecological.