Gas flaring – where oil and gas companies burn off gas released during oil extraction – increased around the world last year to its highest level since 2019, despite a growing international push to regulate and curb the polluting practice.
According to satellite data released by the World Bank on Thursday, gas flaring increased by 7% in 2023, reversing a decline in 2022. The rise resulted in extra planet-warming emissions equivalent to 23 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) – similar to adding about 5 million cars to the roads, it said.
Gas flaring emits greenhouse gases including black carbon and methane, which has a warming effect about 80 times more potent than CO2 over a 20-year period.
The top flaring countries in 2023 were Russia, Iran, Iraq and the United States, with just nine countries responsible for 75% of gas flaring globally.
Last year also saw an uptick in the intensity of flaring, meaning the amount of gas flared per barrel of oil produced, as oil prices spiked above $90 a barrel in the autumn.
In some countries, such as Iran and Libya, increased flaring intensity was attributed to increased oil production, coupled with a lack of investment in and prioritisation of gas recovery and utilisation.
Intensity was also high in countries affected by conflict, such as Syria, where operators struggle to address flaring.
“We’re hopeful that this is somewhat of an anomaly and the longer-term trend will be dramatic reductions,” said Zubin Bamji, manager of the World Bank’s Global Flaring and Methane Reduction (GFMR) Partnership, which monitors flaring and supports governments and oilfield operators to reduce related emissions.
Decoupling trend
That hope is underpinned by the “decoupling of a long-standing correlation between oil production and gas flaring” since the late 1990s, Bamji explained in emailed comments.
Operators can minimise flaring through measures such as re-injecting gas back into the earth or capturing it for utilisation.
Demetrios Papathanasiou, director of the World Bank’s energy and extractives global practice, said in a statement on the data that if the wasted gas were captured and used, it could displace dirtier energy and generate enough power to double electricity supplies in sub-Saharan Africa.
EU warns “delaying tactics” have made plastic treaty deal “very difficult”
But others argue that using flared gas more efficiently – or regulating flaring and its related methane emissions – will not be eliminate the practice as long as fossil fuels are still being produced.
“The number one thing we need to do is put the oil and gas industry into decline,” said Lorne Stockman, research co-director at Oil Change International (OCI), a nonprofit group that campaigns against fossil fuels.
Pledges versus regulation
The increase in flaring suggests that growing global attention and initiatives to eliminate flaring have not been “sufficient or sustainable enough”, according to the World Bank’s report.
Operators and countries representing about 60% of flaring worldwide have endorsed the World Bank’s Zero Routine Flaring by 2030 (ZRF) initiative, while 155 countries have signed a Global Methane Pledge, launched at the COP26 climate summit in 2021, to collectively cut methane emissions.
Jonathan Banks, global director of methane pollution prevention at Clean Air Task Force, an environmental group focused on decarbonising energy, said those initiatives are “helpful”.
But, he added, governments and companies are still “not doing nearly enough” to stop flaring, whether in the form of policies to force businesses to take action or energy firms’ own plans and investments.
Despite dilution, officials say new nature law can restore EU carbon sinks
That is changing, Banks said, referring to recently introduced regulations in the United States, Canada and the European Union which aim to reduce methane emissions. “But those new policies take time to be implemented and enforced,” he noted.
The EU’s Methane Strategy, adopted in May, will include a methane transparency requirement on gas imports that looks to penalise gas flaring and venting – an even more polluting practice of releasing unignited gas.
“The potential to use access to the European market as a way to drive action is huge,” Banks said, adding that only a global standard, applied to all internationally traded oil and gas, could bring an end to flaring and venting.
US gas “certification”
Without such a standard, oil and gas companies are in practice policing themselves when it comes to curbing flaring and methane emissions more broadly.
In the US, for example, third-party gas “certification” companies track methane emissions coming from oil and gas infrastructure and tell consumers their gas is “responsibly sourced”.
According to OCI, there is no set standard for what level of methane leak reductions qualify natural gas for this label.
“Methane became a reputational issue for the US oil and gas industry a few years ago,” said OCI’s Stockman. “Suddenly we saw this proliferation of companies offering to monitor methane, and provide a certification to gas producers as an incentive to sign up.”
Gas certification is currently part of oil and gas companies’ voluntary efforts to act on their methane pollution – in the US, Colorado is the only state that directly measures methane emissions from oil and gas infrastructure. But, according to OCI, the industry is pressing regulators to use certification “as a proxy for regulatory oversight.”
Fossil fuel industry under pressure to cut record-high methane emissions
Research by Earthworks and OCI found that these certifying companies use unreliable technology, which missed all but one of the emissions “events” captured by researchers’ own monitoring equipment.
They also found conflicts of interest on the part of leaders and board members of certification companies, including holding investments in the same oil and gas clients they were working with and promoting fossil gas as a clean energy source.
While regulation is needed, Stockman said, it must be monitored by governments and is near impossible to enforce at scale, due to practical and technological limitations.
Even satellite technology is limited in its capacity to observe small-scale emissions events at “hundreds of thousands of individual sites”, he said.
“We can’t trust the industry,” he added. “The way to keep methane out of the atmosphere is to keep it in the ground.”
(Reporting by Daisy Clague; editing by Megan Rowling)
The post Gas flaring back on the rise, fuelling calls for stronger regulation appeared first on Climate Home News.
Gas flaring back on the rise, fuelling calls for stronger regulation
Claver Gatete is Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa. Jason Veysey is Energy Modeling Program Director and Senior Scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute. Lisa Sachs is Director of the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment at Columbia University.
The case for global energy transition has rarely been clearer. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz earlier this year exposed the cost of unplanned, fossil-dependent systems, while the falling cost of renewables, the rising penetration of electric vehicles, and the growing value of demand flexibility have made the direction of travel obvious. The benefits of a clean, secure, integrated system are no longer in dispute. What remains unclear is how to build it.
Countries around the world have called for faster renewable energy deployment and alternative energy arrangements. A secure, affordable, resilient, decarbonised system requires specific investments in specific places in a specific sequence, optimised across sectors and borders. But very few governments have the analytical foundation to translate those imperatives into investment.
The two instruments that are supposed to determine investment priorities for decarbonisation – Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and country platforms – cannot answer the most basic question facing any country undertaking an energy transition: what should the energy system look like?
-
New coal mine openings slow as East Asian demand plateaus
China and Australia drove global decline in new capacity additions in 2025, but planned production kept growing
To close this gap, every country needs a bankable, economy-wide optimisation model for its energy system. A model is not a plan, but it can help answer the critical question of what the future energy system should look like. It shows how optimal scenarios vary as assumptions and policies are adjusted, calculates investment requirements and sequencing, and quantifies how system costs are affected by assumptions, policies, and exogenous variables like trade policy and financing terms.
Tool for efficient investment
Optimisation is a simplified way of simulating an energy system, but it can be an extremely powerful tool for moving energy planning from reactive (how do we manage the disparate actions in the energy system?) to intentional (what energy system underpins our national objectives?). A model can show how optimal scenarios vary as assumptions and policies are adjusted, and how investment requirements are quantified and sequenced.
Optimisation models can treat the energy system and the sectors it serves as an integrated whole, optimising across sectors and projects in ways that can be mutually reinforcing. If considered independently, growth in industrial demand, transport electrification, and digital infrastructure can add stress to the energy system. But an optimised plan can arrange these and other changes in an efficient, synergistic way.
Two to tango: How governments can unlock private investment for national climate goals
New load can be added where low-cost power is available; industrial customers can ensure the viability of investments in energy supply; electric vehicle charging policy can smooth load curves and reduce costs for all consumers.
Additionally, optimisation modeling can also change the financeability of investments. Taken alone, each project faces uncertainty about the rest of the system, which raises the cost of capital and causes projects to stall or unwind after contracts are signed. A coherent, optimised plan makes visible the coordination that private capital would otherwise have to bet on: identified offtake, sequenced and committed transmission, contracted power supply, and so on.
What COP31 and COP32 should do
The upcoming COPs in Turkey and Ethiopia can shift the center of gravity of international climate cooperation from fragmented commitments to planning. Three moves are urgently needed.
First, optimised, economy-wide, long-term energy system planning must be the foundation on which any meaningful NDC, country platform, or finance commitment rests. NDCs are typically drafted by environment or single-line ministries, with limited cross-sectoral input from ministries of energy, finance, and planning. They contain targets, derived from sectoral strategies or national commitments, not from an analytically grounded picture of what the energy system should look like and what investments would make it work. Country platforms are generally a portfolio of investments assembled from existing project pipelines, rather than derived from a system-level analysis of what an optimised, decarbonised energy system would require.
Second, recognise regions as a key planning unit. Modern integrated energy systems are inherently regional. Renewable endowments are unevenly distributed; balancing variable supply across borders lowers aggregate cost, reduces redundant backup capacity, and unlocks economies of scale no individual nation can achieve. Many energy investments in Southeast Asia, East Africa, Southern Africa and Central Asia may only be financeable in a regional context. Assessing domestic infrastructure without regional optimisation perpetuates the perception that decarbonisation is more expensive than it is.
COP31 leaders unveil global targets, with spotlight on electrification
Third, finance the planning capacity. A coordinated commitment by multilateral development banks, bilateral donors, and philanthropic partners to help every region and its constituent countries develop and maintain their own modelling capability, with open-source tools and regional analytical hubs, would close the most consequential gap in the current architecture. The cost is small relative to current spending on country platforms, failed project preparation, and misallocated infrastructure investment.
This includes supporting regional institutions such as the ASEAN Centre for Energy, the African Energy Commission, regional power pools, and the Latin American and Caribbean Energy Organization to determine what optimised regional systems require. Country-by-country pledging, repeated at every COP, will not deliver what meaningfully integrated systems can.
The 2026 energy crisis made the cost of unplanned, fossil-dependent systems newly visible. That window of clarity will close. The international community should seize the moment to build the planning foundation that has been missing for thirty years, rather than commissioning another round of NDCs or pledges, striving for outcomes neither was designed to deliver.
The post Every country needs a model to help optimise its energy transition appeared first on Climate Home News.
Every country needs a model to help optimise its energy transition
The world is currently experiencing what is expected to become the strongest El Niño on record – dubbed a “super El Niño” by many.
El Niño is the warm phase of a recurring climate pattern in the tropical Pacific that releases heat from the ocean into the atmosphere.
This temporarily raises global temperatures and reshapes rainfall and extreme weather around the world – impacting the lives of billions of people.
The current El Niño event began in June and is expected to last into 2027.
El Niño is part of a wider climate pattern called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle.
The ENSO cycle also has a cool phase, known as La Niña, as well as a “neutral” phase. El Niño and La Niña events typically last between nine and 12 months, but can go on longer.
Below, Carbon Brief explains how the ENSO cycle works, its impacts on extreme weather and global temperatures and why this El Niño event is projected to be the most intense since records began.
The post Explainer: How the ‘super El Niño’ will reshape the world’s weather appeared first on Carbon Brief.
https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/el-nino-explainer/index.html
The second-largest reservoir in the US reached a record-low water height on Saturday – just days after the country’s largest reservoir broke its own record.
Both Lake Mead and Lake Powell are located on the Colorado River.
They provide water for populations across seven US states in the south-western US, with around 40 million people getting some or all of their municipal water from the Colorado River.
The river also provides water for around 5.5m acres (22,258 square kilometres) of farmland across Colorado, Arizona, California and the other states in the river basin.
Experts tell Carbon Brief that climate change, population growth and over-consumption are all contributing to the current record-low levels of the reservoirs.
Record lows
At full capacity, Lakes Mead and Powell can hold a combined 68 cubic kilometres of water – enough to supply all household consumption in the contiguous US for nearly 1.5 years. However, the water level in both reservoirs has been declining for decades.
The chart below shows the water level of Lake Mead, in metres above mean sea level. The reservoir, which began to fill in 1935 following the construction of the Hoover Dam, has a “full pool” maximum capacity of 347.60 metres. The water level in Lake Mead reached a record low of 317.11 metres on 7 August.
The following chart shows the water level of Lake Powell, in metres above mean sea level. Lake Powell’s full-pool level is 1,127.76 metres.
While the reservoir reached its maximum capacity several times in the 1980s, it has not done so since. On 15 August, the water level in Lake Powell was recorded at a new record-low of 1,072.87 metres.
Both reservoirs have continued to decline in the days since breaking their respective records. The downward trend will largely continue in both lakes until next spring, when the snowpack in the mountains of the Upper Colorado River Basin begins to melt, says Dr Jack Schmidt, a senior research scientist at Utah State University’s Center for Colorado River Studies. He tells Carbon Brief:
“The big dilemma of the moment is that we’re only in the middle of August, and we have no assurance of what the coming winter will be. The only thing we can be sure of is that we will be depleting overall total basin reservoir storage from now until, roughly, early April.”
Compounding factors
The record lows across the two reservoirs are the result of several compounding factors, experts tell Carbon Brief.
Since the turn of the 20th century, the amount of water flowing along the Upper Colorado River has declined by about 20%. Research suggests that half of this decline can be attributed to human-induced climate change.
Most of the river’s streamflow comes from the snowpack of the Upper Colorado River Basin, which stretches across five western US states but is primarily located in Colorado and Utah.
This region has been gripped by a historic “megadrought” for more than a quarter of a century. Nearly half of the megadrought’s intensity over 2000-18 is attributable to climate change, according to a 2020 study.
At the same time, the increasing population in the US south-west has put added pressure on the Colorado River’s water supply. The number of people obtaining some or all of their water from the Colorado system has grown by 15 million (around 60%) since 1992.
Schmidt tells Carbon Brief:
“There’s an ultimate cause of the present water crisis, and there’s a proximate cause. The ultimate cause is a warming climate, a warming planet and a pretty clear correlation between warming conditions and decreased runoff in the Colorado River Basin.
“The proximate cause is that in this messy democratic republic of ours, big policy decisions that match the variability of the climate occur painfully slowly – with intense political negotiations – and only incrementally.”
On 31 July, the US Bureau of Reclamation, which manages water resources in the western US, released an environmental impact statement on its proposed post-2026 strategy for managing Lakes Powell and Mead. The strategy itself has not been released yet.
Schmidt notes that the statement does appear to give the Bureau flexibility to “respond to crisis” by reducing the delivery of water to several states. However, he adds:
“They acknowledge it won’t work if we just stay critically dry, and of course every climate model for the 21st century, especially with a continually warming planet, says that that’s exactly what’s going to happen.”
The post Analysis: The two largest reservoirs in the US have hit record-low levels appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: The two largest reservoirs in the US have hit record-low levels
-
Climate Change1 year ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Greenhouse Gases1 year ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Greenhouse Gases2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Climate Change2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Climate Change2 years ago
Bill Discounting Climate Change in Florida’s Energy Policy Awaits DeSantis’ Approval
-
Renewable Energy10 months agoSending Progressive Philanthropist George Soros to Prison?
-
Greenhouse Gases1 year ago
嘉宾来稿：探究火山喷发如何影响气候预测
-
Carbon Footprint2 years agoUS SEC’s Climate Disclosure Rules Spur Renewed Interest in Carbon Credits