Onshore gas flaring in the U.S. nosedived in the third quarter of 2021, falling to its lowest level since at least 2012, Rystad Energy stated.

Flaring activity reached 380-390 million cubic feet per day in September, a roughly 24 percent fall from the prior month alone. Flaring activity is tumbling as best practices that only major operators had previously adopted spread to smaller, independent players.

The most significant contributors to this steep decline were the Bakken and Permian plays, which saw reduced flaring of around 50 million cfd each in September. This trend was not unexpected, but the Permian declined rate was more dramatic than anticipated.

Rystad noted that U.S. flaring data from the early days of the modern shale era was inconclusive, meaning this record could be the lowest flaring activity since the shale boom of the 2000s.

“While the reduction in the Bakken was largely in line with expectations, based on our analysis of satellite data, the rate of change in the Permian is surprising,” Artem Abramov, head of shale research at Rystad Energy, said.

The decline in flaring activity across the board is a concrete sign that best practices are spreading beyond just large producers to small, privately-owned operators too, and this trend looks likely to continue in the foreseeable future,” he added.

The contribution of privately-owned players to gas flaring totals has declined from a record high of 61.5 percent in April 2021 and sits at 52.3 percent as of September. However, that rate is significantly greater than the same companies’ contributions to total gas output, which was 24.8 percent in September.

Rystad stated that declining gas flaring was a trend across the basins. The average flaring intensity across the 50 largest gas producers in the Permian was 1.6 percent in the third quarter of 2021, compared to 2.5 percent in the first half of 2021 and 3.2 percent in 2020.

The Permian’s wellhead flaring intensity hit a multi-year record low of 0.8 percent on a gas production basis, and 32 cubic feet per barrel on an oil production basis, in September. The basin has demonstrated steady improvements in its flaring intensity since 2019, closely following the reduction in south Texas’ Eagle Ford, with a five-to-six-month lag.