Environmentally-Friendly Flaring

Before the 1940s, it was a common practice in industry to vent hydrocarbon process streams to the atmosphere, unburned. Typical vent gases are flammable and may contain harmful chemicals. Eventually, regulations required that these vented streams be burned, so flares became both a safety and environmental control device. Since the inception of flaring, technology advancements have made some significant progress towards making flaring more environmentally-friendly. These include: (1) reducing the fuel consumption of flare pilots, (2) implementing purge reduction devices to reduce the amount of supplemental fuel gas burned (3) using steam more efficiently to achieve smokeless flaring and (4) installing flare gas recovery systems to reduce the amount of gas flared. The purpose of this paper is to discuss how these methods conserve energy and reduce emissions from flares.