Agreed, uniform carbon pricing would make a lot of things easier. But note that the flaring issue isn't about extraction of natural gas. If a field is known to have good gas reserves and the operator is drilling with the specific intention of extracting gas, there won't be any flaring. (Beyond small and temporary flaring related to system maintenance.) Flaring is almost entirely a matter of disposal of associated gas from oil wells. And particularly non-conventional oil wells in tight sand and shale formations. Fracked wells.

For oil wells in conventional formations with good rock permeability, flaring is rare. Even if the amount of associated gas isn't enough to justify the investment needed to get it to market, there's an easy alternative. It's re-injected into the formation to drive more oil to the production wells. Re-injection doesn't work, however, in tight formations of the sort that require fracking.

Creative solutions are beginning to emerge. They're variations on the parable of "Mohammed and the mountain". If it's impractical for the gas to come to end users, maybe there are end users who can come to the gas? Gas-fired generators can be pretty small and mobile, for example, and so are power-hungry supercomputer clusters of the sort used for bitcoin mining. Really anything that would benefit from super-cheap gas or electricity, can be built into one or more shipping containers, and driven to a field site. Starlink can provide the site with low latency, high bandwidth data communication if needed. I can think of lots of applications, and I'm sure others can think of more. I don't expect the flaring problem to remain unresolved for long.

Those are good points, Mark. Natural gas prices are always pretty volatile though, and I wouldn't expect to see any correlation between flaring activity and gas prices on a short term basis. Investment decisions are made on the basis of long term expectations. If there's a long term outlook for higher prices, that might tip an operator's decision to invest in a pipeline connection to the gas collection system. After that's been done, there's no further need for flaring -- from that site.

Investment decisions in non-conventional oil and gas plays are weird, however. The decline rates are murder, and require a steady stream of new well completions to maintain production. Most individual wells will never produce enough to pay off. But high initial flows provide all-important cash flow, and awareness of impending decline creates constant pressure for innovation to reduce costs.

I'm amazed at the advances that have allowed multiple horizontal wells to be drilled as spokes from the same main well bore, and the techniques for staged completions from the same central bore. Watching the industry is somewhat like watching someone who swam out too far from the beach, got swept away by the rip tide, and is struggling to keep their head above water. But as they're floundering, they're teaching themselves to swim more efficiently, and use up less energy treading water. There's something there one has to admire -- even if they were stupid to have ventured into those waters in the first place.

Transportable power generators and power-hungry applications in shipping containers may be the next act in the flounderer's desperate learning process. The applications relieve oil and gas field operators of the hard decision to expend precious cash for a gas infrastructure connection that may or may not pay off. The application comes to them, and whatever price it pays for the gas it uses will be better than wasting it. The transportable applications won't put any of the currently wasted gas into the supply chain directly, but indirectly it will. It will be removing its consumption from the primary gas infrastructure and leaving more there for other applications.

There's still the problem of declining production. When supply from the current site drops off too much for the application to operate efficiently, then it packs up and moves on to another site. The site it's leaving either reverts to flaring, but at a lower volume, or a new transportable application with a smaller power appetite moves in.

I think I just invented a new job category: schedule planning and dispatching for transportable power applications.