Quote:
Originally Posted by Monahammer
This is a pretty shallow view of this issue. Facility startups play into it, along with some unplanned outages and equipment malfunctions.
We have a real struggle here to get facilities built. The Capital Cost for a facility in our region is approximately 1.5X cost of competitor. We could add regulations that diminish or eliminate flaring, but that would increase the capital cost of new projects, sometimes substantially. The flares are generally safety related as well- have to have somewhere to put the pressurized gas that doesnt trap it and create other problems. Right now we have strategies to address the additional capital cost and bring us to parity with near competitors like the Gulf Coast. But adding additional capital costs through regulation will likely be a death march for future facility capture, unless we meet it with an incentive to match.
Do we, the taxpayers, want an incentive for flair mitigation? Or do we want to have no more facility development? Or status quo and let it burn?
It's more complex than just Flairing bad and we are really bad!
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I'd be OK if we were just worrying about Rick Flairing(though the current government may take issue with that, too!)
I do get the complications of flaring, I'm just always amused when we fail to hit targets we don't alter the target to make it more realistic, or find ways to hit them, we just get rid of them. It was a general governance guffaw, not a specific one.