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: 2) by VLM on Sunday September 02 2018, @03:13PM
Good luck enforcing "we get to burn high sulfur fuel in this engine because the fuel woudda been wasted but not in this engine over dere"
Also you run into interesting flame temp issues... the unburned heavier crap is going to make life for the cat conv very difficult while at the same time if you lean it out you can produce plenty of nitrogen oxides creating more acidic exhaust than just torching it.
Given a crap enough fuel, I can see the exhaust being filthier than just lighting it up due to the nitrogen oxides production alone.