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Southern Iraq’s toxic twilight: burning gas and poisoning air
It never gets dark in Nahran Omar, which is continually lit by flares from five oil wells.
Iraq (New York Times)- The men of Nahran Omar, a village in the heart of southern Iraq’s oil country, filed into a Shiite shrine clutching envelopes with X-rays, medical reports and death certificates. They had come to describe the misery they say is caused by the burning gas and chemicals spewing out of the oil wells in their village. Each one had a sick son or a dying wife, an ill brother or sister.
The chemicals, which pollute the air Nahran Omar and other oil towns across southern Iraq comes from the burning of natural gas
Though many countries have reduced the practice, Iraq still continues to flare more than half the natural gas produced by its oil fields, more than any other country except Russia.
According to the International Energy Agency, the amount of gas being flared by Iraq is enough to power 3 million homes.
Iraqi flaring releases as much as 30 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, nearly 10 percent of the flaring emissions of the greenhouse gas worldwide.
For many years, recapturing the gas was never a priority for the oil companies or the government. Many oil-producing countries, including the United States, flare gas, but rarely close to homes.
In Nahran Omar, the flares roar day and night, kicking out so much heat that the faces of people who live nearby look permanently sunburned. The leaves of nearby trees curl brown on the sides that face the flares. Children born in Nahran Omar in the past decade have never known silence nor seen a dark night sky because the flares cast an unending, brilliant light over the surrounding landscape.
Moreover, the flares produce what the locals call oil rain, an oily precipitate made from the amalgam of water and hydrocarbons that do not completely burn during flaring and which, as it cools, absorbs water in the humid atmosphere.
Despite all of this, the Iraqi government has failed to enforce the already existing laws governing the flaring of natural in spite of Oil companies commitments to ensuring its operations are conducted in a safe manner.
Cheaper to Pay Fines
The villagers have turned to government and quasi-government agencies for help to no avail. Among them: the Basra Oil Company, a state owned enterprise that has a majority share in all oil production in southern Iraq; the provincial council’s oil and gas committee, which was recently eliminated; and the Basra branches of the Ministry of Health and Environment.
Senior officials at each of those institutions acknowledge that flaring wastes energy and degrades the air quality. The Environment Ministry, which five years ago was merged with the Health Ministry, has levied numerous fines against the Basra Oil company for a variety of violations including flaring beyond the legal limit. To this end, the company had acknowledged that it is cheaper to pay the fines imposed on them than to build a recapture plant.
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