(2024043) Emissions Study and Equipment Design/Build for Stripper Well Production

Nowadays, concerns about global warming and the rise in greenhouse gasses grow each day. A major contributor to this is the hydrocarbon methane (CH₄) in natural gas. These concerns have caused government agencies, such as the United States Environmental Protection Agency, to require companies to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions their oil wells release into the atmosphere. One such source of these gasses is small oil wells scattered across the United States. Eighty percent of US oil and natural gas production sites are low-production well sites. Low-production wells are a disproportionately large source of methane emissions, emitting 50% more than the total emissions from the Permian Basin, one of the world’s largest oil and gas-producing regions. It is estimated that low-production well sites represent roughly half of all oil and gas well site methane emissions. Many of the standard methods of natural gas management are either too inefficient or too large a scale for the amount of methane produced. This is why this group has created a compact flaring tower to burn off the emitted methane, producing CO2 and water. The expected outcome is to yield a product that will aid in the reduction of greenhouse gasses emitted by small stripper well facilities.