The Texas Railroad Commission last month surprised many: it said it would tighten the rules for gas flaring at oil fields later this year. Texas is certainly not the state with the best environmental policies record for obvious reasons. After all, it is the largest single producer of oil in the United States. But gas flaring literally wastes billions of dollars. Perhaps the time has come to stop the waste. Every year, the oil and gas industry flares some 140 billion cubic meters of natural gas. The reasons vary: at oil fields, gas is flared when there are no pipelines to transport it to a collection or storage hub; at refineries, some gases need to be flared to avoid explosions. And there is more. Many oil producers have no idea how much gas they are wasting through flaring because they have no monitoring systems, Mark Davis, CEO of Capterio […]