Permian Flaring Down in Q1: Rystad
Natural gas flaring in the Permian basin fell in Q1 2020, consultancy Rystad Energy said in an April 6 report, one of the few “bright lights” in the current market environment.
“Our preliminary estimate for the first quarter… of the year shows an emerging downward trend in basin-wide gas flaring,” Rystad said. “We estimate total gas flaring declined to 700mn ft3/day Q1, with 550mn ft3/day flared at the wellhead – the lowest quarterly flaring rate since the third quarter of 2018.”
Permian flaring reached an all-time high of 750mn ft3/day in Q3 2019, Rystad said in a November 2019 report.
The Texas portion of the Delaware sub-basin accounts for the majority of Permian-wide flaring, with levels at close to 300mn ft3/day in Q1. But even as gross Delaware gas production continues to grow, driven largely by activity in the pure play Alpine High, flaring intensity has declined substantially, to between 4.0% and 4.7% in the last six months from a peak of 5.8% in Q4 2017.
Flaring intensities are also down on the New Mexico side of the Delaware, to around 2.7% recently from 4.7% in Q4 2018, and in the northern portion of the Midland sub-basin in Texas, where it has dropped to around 3.1% after spiking most of last year due to un-planned gas plant outages.
“The-basin wide wellhead flaring ratio fell below 3.5% in the first quarter of 2020, and additional improvements are expected to materialize throughout the remainder of 2020,” Artem Abramov, Rystad’s head of shale research, said. “This is especially true now, in this period of collapsing basin-wide completion activity amid an oil price crash and prolonged price weakness.”