A single facility in Russia is burning off gas worth an estimated £8.4m a day - fuel that would previously been exported to Germany - it has been claimed.
As Europe's energy costs soar, analysis shared with the BBC claims a liquified natural gas (LNG) plant at Portovaya, around 160 miles north-west of St Petersburg, is burning 4.34 million cubic metres of gas daily, prompting fears that the large volumes of carbon dioxide and soot it is creating could exacerbate the melting of Arctic ice.
BBC News reports that analysis by Rystad Energy says the first signs that something was awry came from Finnish citizens over the border who spotted a large flame on the horizon earlier this summer. Portovaya is located close to a compressor station at the start of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline which carries gas under the sea to Germany, but supplies through the pipeline have been curtailed since mid-July. Russia blames technical issues but Germany says it is purely a political move following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Researchers have noted a significant increase in heat emanating from the facility since June, which is thought to be from the burning of natural gas. Burning off gas is common at processing plants for technical or safety reasons, but the scale of this burn has confounded experts.
"I've never seen an LNG plant flare so much," Dr Jessica McCarty, an expert on satellite data from Miami University in Ohio, told BBC News. "Starting around June, we saw this huge peak, and it just didn't go away. It's stayed very anomalously high."
Mark Davis, CEO of Capterio, a company involved in finding solutions to gas flaring, said the flaring was not accidental and was more likely a deliberate decision made for operational reasons. "Operators often are very hesitant to actually shut down facilities for fear that they may be technically difficult or costly to start up again, and it's probably the case here," he told BBC News.
Others believe that there could be technical challenges in dealing with the large volumes of gas that were being supplied to the Nord Stream pipeline. Russian energy company Gazprom may have intended to use that gas to make LNG at the new plant, but may have had problems handling it and the safest option is to flare it off.
"This kind of long-term flaring may mean that they are missing some equipment," said Esa Vakkilainen, an energy engineering professor from Finland's LUT University. "Because of the trade embargo with Russia, they are not able to make the high-quality valves needed in oil and gas processing. So maybe there are some valves broken and they can't get them replaced."
The environmental impacts of the burning are worrying scientists. In addition to releasing around 9,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent each day from this flare, the burning causes other significant issues such as the production of black carbon - the sooty particles that are produced through the incomplete burning of fuels like natural gas.
"Of particular concern with flaring at Arctic latitudes is the transport of emitted black carbon northward where it deposits on snow and ice and significantly accelerates melting," Prof Matthew Johnson, from Carleton University in Canada told the BBC.
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