Everything you need to know about flaring in the Eagle Ford Shale

Natural gas flares have spread by the thousands across the Eagle Ford Shale. The glow of flames and lights of 24-hour drilling and fracking operations are so widespread, the region south of San Antonio looks like a sprawling city in satellite photos.

Why do oil companies flare gas? What’s being done to solve the problem? We have answers.

The San Antonio Express-News spent a year investigating the impact of flaring and published Up in Flames in August 2014. Here are some common questions and answers about flaring and what citizens can do about it.

What are gas flares and why do oil companies use them?

Oil isn’t the only thing that comes out of the ground in the Eagle Ford Shale. Natural gas is often mixed in the oil. This is called casinghead gas, a reference to the heavy metal casings that are fitted on top of an oil well.

South Texas lacked the pipelines and infrastructure that are needed to handle the skyrocketing gas production from the Eagle Ford Shale energy boom. The solution? Oilfield workers constructed tall metallic spires known as flare stacks to burn off natural gas and release it into the Texas sky.

The idea behind flaring is to burn impurities in the natural gas. The combustion turns the gas to carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change. Sometimes gas is vented, unburned, directly to the atmosphere. This releases gas in its raw form that is mostly composed of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that traps 20 times as much heat in the earth's atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

How much natural gas is going to waste in the Eagle Ford Shale?

No region in Texas flared as much gas as the Eagle Ford Shale.

Since the early days of the energy boom in 2009, statewide flaring and venting in Texas surged by 400 percent to 33 billion cubic feet in 2012. Nearly-two thirds of the gas lost that year — 21 billion cubic feet — came from the Eagle Ford.

When asked about gas flares, state regulators touted the low overall rate of flaring in Texas. But they didn’t say how much gas was being flared in the Eagle Ford Shale. The Express-News analyzed a database of monthly production reports from the Railroad Commission of Texas, the state agency that oversees the oil and gas industry. The database shows how much gas is produced in Texas — and what happens to it.

The records show that most of the gas flared in the Eagle Ford Shale comes from oil wells. Oil producers flared and vented 32.7 billion cubic feet of casinghead gas from 2009 to 2012.

That's nearly 8 percent of all casinghead gas produced in the region — 10 times higher than the flaring rate in the rest of Texas. And it's more than enough to meet the needs of every household in the San Antonio area that relies on the irreplaceable fossil fuel for an entire year.

Do gas flares pollute the air?

Each flare is small enough to escape government reporting requirements on air emissions. But collectively, the Eagle Ford flares emit more pollution than oil refineries.

After the Express-News obtained flaring data from the Railroad Commission, the newspaper plugged the numbers into Texas Commission on Environmental Quality formulas to find out how much pollution is emitted from Eagle Ford flares.

In the early days of the boom, flaring released 427 tons of air pollution each year. By 2012, pollution levels shot up to 15,453 tons, a 3,500 percent increase that exceeds the total emissions of all six oil refineries in Corpus Christi.

The pollutants include a precursor to acid rain known as sulfur dioxide, which smells like lit matches and can cause breathing problems.

The flares also emit carbon monoxide, a toxic gas formed from combustion; nitrogen oxides, or NOx, which can produce ground-level ozone; and volatile organic compounds, known as VOCs, which include a variety of pollutants such as benzene, a sweet-smelling carcinogen.

Terry Clawson, spokesman for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, said air monitoring stations in South Texas haven't detected "any significant impact on air quality."

He emphasized that flaring pollution is spread across the entire region, although the Express-News analysis shows some counties fare better than others.

A quarter of all the Eagle Ford flaring pollutants came from La Salle County, which flared the most gas in Texas in 2012.

What are regulators doing about flaring?

State officials say every major source of flaring in the oil patch goes through a permitting process that requires energy companies to explain why natural gas can't be collected from a well.

Even if a company flares without permission, a computer system is supposed to automatically catch the violation.

"Our trained staff works closely with operators to ensure compliance with commission rules," the Railroad Commission states on a web page it published to address questions about flaring.

But the Express-News investigation found some of the top flaring sites in South Texas failed to ask the Railroad Commission for permission to flare — even as they wasted more than a billion cubic feet of gas in 2012.

That's enough gas to fuel CPS Energy's O.W. Sommers power plant for a month of peak summer demand.

Milton Rister, the Railroad Commission's executive director, blamed the problem on a flood of drilling paperwork that swamped the agency.

Rister said the agency was taking steps to deal with its backlog and identifying companies that have failed to apply for state-mandated flaring permits.

He said the commission conducted its own analysis of flaring data in December 2012 and found 82 companies in the shale region of South Texas and other parts of the state had failed to apply for flaring approvals. Since then the agency has found hundreds more.

The Railroad Commission threatened to shut those wells if companies didn't follow state flaring regulations, Rister said, and all the companies eventually complied. The agency also took enforcement action against companies identified in the Express-News investigation and fined them.

I live in the Eagle Ford Shale. Who do I contact with concerns about flaring?

You can contact two state agencies about gas flares in your community: The Railroad Commission of Texas, which oversees the oil and gas industry, and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which handles complaints about air pollution.

For concerns about odors and air pollution, contact the TCEQ by calling the agency’s complaint line at 888-777-3186, or online on this web page.

For other complaints about flaring or other activities at a well site, you can call the Railroad Commission’s field and operations line at (512) 463-6830, provide your county, and you’ll be directed to the proper field office. You can also email publicassist@rrc.state.tx.us.

The Railroad Commission publishes general information about flaring, and you can look up how much gas is being flared at specific sites on the commission’s production query page or its new interactive map page. Look for option 4 under the “disposition” tab to find reported amounts of flared and vented gas.

To talk to someone in the media, you can contact John Tedesco or Jennifer Hiller, the reporters who are covering the issue for the Express-News.

What else has been published about this problem?

Check out the entire Express-News series of Up in Flames:

Part 1: Flares in Eagle Ford Shale wasting natural gas

Part 2: Flares emitting more pollution than refineries

Part 3: Top flaring sites lacked state oversight

Part 4: While the gas burns, companies explore solutions

The story: How we did it

Continuing coverage:

Reaction: Nelson Wolff calls for tighter regulation of flaring

Opinion: Flaring: The dark side of the energy boom

Pollution: A new pollution monitor planned, but gaps remain

Waste: Flaring surged in 2014