Researchers at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and the University of Michigan (U-M) have published a new study showing an advanced new methane flare burner, created with additive manufacturing and machine learning, eliminates 98% of methane vented during oil production.
Researchers at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and the University of Michigan (U-M) have published a new study showing an advanced new methane flare burner, created with additive manufacturing and machine learning, eliminates 98% of methane vented during oil production. The burner was designed by U-M engineering researchers and tested at SwRI.
Oil producers can generate methane during oil production and typically use flare stacks to burn off this gas. However, wind blowing across conventional open flame burners reduces their effectiveness, releasing 40% or more of methane into the atmosphere. Over 100 years, methane has 28 times greater global warming potential than carbon dioxide and is 84 times more potent on a 20-year timescale. Flaring reduces overall global warming potential, but ineffective flaring dampens this strategy.
SwRI collaborated with U-M engineers to leverage machine learning, computational fluid dynamics and additive manufacturing to create and test a burner with high methane destruction efficiency and combustion stability at the challenging conditions present in the field.
Read more at Southwest Research Institute
Image: Researchers at Southwest Research Institute and the University of Michigan developed and tested an advanced methane flare burner using additive manufacturing and machine learning. A new study found that the new design eliminated 98% of methane vented during oil production. (Credit: Southwest Research Institute)
