Oil and gas companies in Alberta exceeded last year the Canadian oil-producing province’s self-imposed limit on natural gas flaring, for a second year running, according to estimates by Reuters.
Flaring, the controlled burning of natural gas that takes place during the production and processing of gas and oil, was regulated for 20 years by a self-imposed limit on the flaring volumes—until last week.
The Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) last week issued a bulletin to announce the “removal of the provincial solution gas flaring limit,” per a ministerial order by Alberta’s Environment Minister Rebecca Shulz.
In the two years before scrapping the flaring limit, Alberta saw that limit exceeded by energy companies in both 2023 and 2024, according to a Reuters analysis of data from the AER.
Per the data, oil and gas firms operating in Alberta, the heart of Canada’s oil production, flared about 912.7 million cubic meters of natural gas in 2024. This was 36% above the 670 million cubic meters limit that was still in place back then.
Energy companies in Alberta had also exceeded the flaring limit in the previous year, when the flared volume was 753 million cubic meters in 2023.
Now the province has removed the limit because it believes that the rule from 20 years ago does not reflect the jump in Alberta’s oil production in the past two decades or other efforts to cut emissions, Ryan Fournier, a spokesperson for Environment Minister Shulz, told Reuters via email.
Meanwhile, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is working to engage private backers for a new crude oil pipeline to ship about 1 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude from Canada’s oil-producing province to British Columbia on the West Coast.
Alberta has been a vocal supporter of increased pipeline takeaway capacity from the province and now looks to have more options to sell crude to non-U.S. customers, amid soured relations with its top trading partner under U.S. President Donald Trump.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
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