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A comment on Millions of abandoned oil wells are leaking methane, a climate menace.

Re:Millions of abandoned oil wells are leaking methane, a cl... by AnimalMuppet on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @01:46PM (#23554356)
A climate menace... and also the main component of natural gas. And we're moving away from coal to natural gas for things like power plants. That's money that they are leaking.

(Of course, it may not be enough money to make it economically worthwhile to collect the methane...)

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Re:Millions of abandoned oil wells are leaking methane, a cl... by Wohlf on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @03:07PM (#23555408)
I'm not one to defend fossil fuels, but natural gas is objectively an improvement over coal with respect to climate change.

In my ideal world, we'd be replacing all dirty baseload power with nuclear, but c'est la vie.

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Re:Millions of abandoned oil wells are leaking methane, a cl... by pjc50 on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @03:48PM (#23555882)
Gas is astonishingly cheap and routinely wasted by flaring.
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Re:Millions of abandoned oil wells are leaking methane, a cl... by nogabebop23 on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @01:55PM (#23554478)
gas is far more efficient but very challenging to transport and store. Often it's far more economic to flare or release vs. try and get to some sort of consumption market.
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Re:Millions of abandoned oil wells are leaking methane, a cl... by Synaesthesia on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @02:51PM (#23555197)
That’s what they do in Nigeria, but it causes environmental problems as well as health problems like asthma.
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Re:Millions of abandoned oil wells are leaking methane, a cl... by dasm on Thursday June 18, 2020 @06:13PM (#23568715)
Not only in Nigeria. https://www.worldoil.com/news/2020/4/7/permian-gas-flaring-d...
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