I thought that oil producing wells, flared off unwanted gas that was insufficient to warrant commercial production, so I don;t understand why a gas producer like Woodside, would need to continuously flare??
Flaring of methane aside, the bigger more intractable problem is the CO2 content of some of these fields. For the Gorgon field it is as high as 15% of the raw gas stream. Given the failure of their sequestration efforts, quite a lot of this is released directly into the atmosphere.
However, Methanol can be produced using CO2 and Hydrogen and I would think that obtaining sufficient quantities of these gases in the same location is hard to do. This is where Hazer comes in. The Hazer process can be used to produce hydrogen on site where the CO2 is separated out, and methanol can then be produced. This turns the CO2 waste product into an easily transportable valuable commodity. The producer can even claim that the CO2 has effectively been sequestered because the graphite produced along with the hydrogen using the Hazer process is equivalent to the CO2 that would otherwise have been released into the atmosphere.
So gas producers do have an interest in using Hazer technology on the production side. I think this is potentially one of the highest value applications of the Hazer process. Natural gas producers, who are under increasing pressure to clean up their act should be very interested and so this could be an area where the most rapid adoption of Hazer technology occurs.
Similarly any industrial process that consumes natural gas for power / heating, and producers a pure stream of CO2, such as processes using Calix's technology, could easily add on the Hazer process to not just to burn hydrogen for heating, but also produce hydrogen to combine with the CO2 and produce methanol - effectively eliminating most of their CO2 emissions.
There is an example of something very similar but using hydrogen from electrolysis.
Vast secures approvals for solar methanol project
https://www.aumanufacturing.com.au/vast-secures-approvals-for-solar-methanol-projectIt would be nice if they could trial this at the CDP, since they are currently venting the CO2 component of the biogas they are using. They could be used to produce methanol and even at a very small scale would prove a very valuable point.
If a reliable supply of low carbon methanol was available it would be broadly adopted as a fuel by the shipping industry which is also struggling to find low carbon solutions, as such there is a large market for methanol.
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