(Paris) Several media outlets accuse large oil companies of “opacity” regarding environmentally harmful discharges linked to “flaring”, a process which consists of burning natural gas from oil extraction on site.
CO emissions2 linked to the “flaring” of natural gas from oil extraction have reached 1.4 billion tonnes in eleven years in 18 countries in Africa and the Middle East, according to this survey published Friday conducted by Mediapart and thirteen international media , coordinated by the journalist collective and media network European Investigative Collaborations (EIC).
“European industrialists are those who pollute the most, with 33%” of these 1.4 billion, “followed by oil companies from the Middle East (31%) and North America (14%),” according to them.
Flaring is one of the solutions for evacuating, by burning, the natural gas that escapes during oil extraction. But “the gas is burned for nothing, while mature technologies make it possible to reinject it into the ground or recover it to produce electricity,” notes Mediapart.
Flaring emitted the equivalent of 381 million tonnes of CO2 in 2023, according to the World Bank. This represents 1% of annual global emissions, more than those of France (315 million).
However, companies maintain “opacity” on these broadcasts, according to the media. “Some of them voluntarily report their flaring emissions, but only at the global level, without any additional details. »
The media consortium therefore estimated the greenhouse gases from flames emitted by 665 oil and gas infrastructures between 2012 and 2022 and then attributed them to the companies operating the fields concerned.
“We also observed discrepancies between the results of our survey and the declarations of certain European majors, which suggests that they are under-declaring their emissions,” writes Mediapart.