A gas flare, alternatively known as a flare stack, flare boom, ground flare, or flare pit, is a gas combustion device used in places such as petroleum refineries, chemical plants and natural gas processing plants, oil or gas extraction sites having oil wells, gas wells, offshore oil and gas rigs and landfills.
In industrial plants, flare stacks are primarily used for burning off flammable gas released by safety valves during unplanned overpressuring of plant equipment.[1][2][3][4][5] During plant or partial plant startups and shutdowns, they are also often used for the planned combustion of gases over relatively short periods.
At oil and gas extraction sites, gas flares are similarly used for a variety of startup, maintenance, testing, safety, and emergency purposes.[6] In a practice known as production flaring, they may also be used to dispose of large amounts of unwanted associated petroleum gas, possibly throughout the life of an oil well.[7]
- ^ "Section 3: VOC Controls, Chapter 1: Flares" (PDF). EPA Air Pollution Cost Control Manual (Report) (6th ed.). Research Triangle Park, NC: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). January 2002. EPA 452/B-02-001.
- ^ A. Kayode Coker (2007). Ludwig's Applied Process Design for Chemical And Petrochemical Plants, Volume 1 (4th ed.). Gulf Professional Publishing. pp. 732–737. ISBN 978-0-7506-7766-0.
- ^ Sam Mannan, ed. (2005). Lee's Loss Prevention in the Process Industries: Hazard Identification, Assessment and Control, Volume 1 (3rd ed.). Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann. pp. 12/67–12/71. ISBN 978-0-7506-7857-5.
- ^ Milton R. Beychok (2005). Fundamentals of Stack Gas Dispersion (Fourth ed.). self-published. ISBN 978-0-9644588-0-2. (See Chapter 11, Flare Stack Plume Rise).
- ^ "A Proposed Comprehensive Model for Elevated Flare Flames and Plumes", David Shore, Flaregas Corporation, AIChE 40th Loss Prevention Symposium, April 2006.
- ^ "IPIECA - Resources - Flaring Classification". International Petroleum Industry Environmental Conservation Association (IPIECA). Retrieved 2019-12-29.
- ^ Global Gas Flaring Reduction Partnership (GGFR), World Bank, October 2011 Brochure.