Until renewable sources of energy like wind or solar become more reliable and less expensive, people worldwide remain reliant on fossil fuels for transportation and energy. This means that if people want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, there need to be better ways of mitigating the effects of extracting and burning oil and gas.
Now, Adam Brandt, assistant professor of energy resources engineering in the School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences at Stanford, and his colleagues have performed a first global analysis comparing emissions associated with oil production techniques -- a step toward developing policies that could reduce those emissions. They published their work Aug. 30 in Science.
The group found that the burning of unwanted gas associated with oil production -- called flaring -- remains the most carbon-intensive part of producing oil. Brandt spoke with Stanford Report about the group's findings and strategies for reducing flaring.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by khallow on Saturday September 01 2018, @10:29AM
What makes that misguided? Research can't have global scope because researchers don't have vast resources combined with similarly vast ability to produce holistic research that covers everything every time. Instead, research (particularly, individual publication of papers) is by necessity very constrained.
Here, we have a relatively large group of 24 people doing an already enormous task (they're already using satellite data and a variety of other sources). And you expect them to cover demand as well (which has completely different characteristics)?