Flaming arrows integral to oil pumping: 1960
Amateur flaming-arrow archers (not a phrase that inspires confidence!) kept the fires burning in Alberta's gas towers in 1960:
Bow Turns Flame Thrower for Oilmen (Apr, 1960)
Waste gas fumes burning off from this flare tower at Nevis. Alberta, sometimes blow out, and the mechanical relighting device doesn’t always work. The oilmen keep a bow and a fire arrow handy and relight the flare by shooting a flame through the fumes. It doesn’t require any skill at archery—note this oiler’s unusual form.
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What I've never understood is why they just burn that excess gas without trying to harness its energy, somehow.
I went by some refineries here in Montréal last week, and saw those torch-like flames, and it seemed like such a waste. At the very least, they could put something above that flame that turns the resulting heat into electricity to power part of the refinery.
I guess the wasteful mentality comes with the territory: having an embarrassment of riches makes you less sensitive to small amounts of waste.
I am sure in the north sea off Scotland, They used to fire a bullet over the fumes!
That might be an urban myth though!
Flaming arrows also gave us a memorable olympics moment:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSA9xUUXj6E
I saw a documentary on the British North Sea oil platforms about 2 years ago. They had a guy lighting the gas flare by firing a marine flare pistol into the gas.
This is what you get for not including a wizard in the party.
@ #1
Can we be confident that if it pays to pollute and they are authorized to do it they will ?
J.
ouch. that guy hasn't skinned his forearm NEARLY enough. and as for the thumb n forefinger grip...
Where is Hawkeye when we need him?
I think that photo is staged just for the camera - the guy has no idea what he's doing. He's holding the bow below the grip area. The arrow isn't even on the shelf provided at the top of the hand grip of the cheap 30-pound fiberglass self bow (that's what it looks like). If he released the fletches would skin his arm. If he's using a European grip with the fingers on the string, when he releases the arrow will shoot off to the right at about 75 degrees. And last but most certainly not least, he's "aiming" way too low.
The reason refineries flare off the gas instead of saving it is because it's not in commercial quantities. There is always some natural gas in crude. It's usually in such low concentration that it would take weeks or even months to collect enough of it to make it feasible to ship it. Collecting it would require piping, pumps, and tankage that would all have to be built and maintained. The cost of doing that is way more than the commercial value of the gas, so they'd lose money if they went to the trouble. As for using it to power the plant, again they have the same problems. It's in such low concentrations it would take them days to collect enough gas to run a generator for a few hours.
I'm tempted to relate the story of myself, Pete, and the stick of dynamite duct-taped to an arrow...
But instead I'll pass along what my oil-refinery-worker roommate told me years ago about refinery flares.
The flare is a safety measure. You can learn a lot about how efficient and safe a refinery is by watching the flare!
Modern refineries use some very powerful processes, such as catalytic cracking, on titanic quantities of poisonous and flammable material - a description which applies to nearly all refined petroleum products really.
If a pipe breaks or gets plugged up at the refinery, and you are generating ten thousand tons of product per minute, you can't just flip a switch and turn the process off while you repair the pipeline. It takes time to shut things down, and in the meanwhile you have to do something with enough toxic, flammable stuff to kill ten thousand people and/or blow a mile wide crater in the ground. If you burn it, the hot combustion products will rise and hopefully do a minimal amount of environmental damage (as compared to flooding the nearest town with six inches of gasoline, for example).
So, the flare has to be lit, and it has to have enough capacity to take the full output of all the processes running at any given moment, and it has to be engineered so that the escaping pressure of a reaction that's gone completely out of control won't just blow it out. Otherwise, you are guaranteed to have a titanic disaster - it's just a matter of time, since all refineries run around the clock and all pipes do eventually fail and chemical reactions do occasionally run amok.
If your local refinery is exceedingly well run, it will have a pretty little crown of blue flames dancing around the tip of the flare stack, and every once in a while it will gust up into a ten-to-forty foot orange burn as the output of some process is rerouted due to some unforeseen emergency.
If your local refinery is poorly run, the flare will burn a guttering smoky orange all the time, and it will frequently blow fifty feet of fire for a few hours while people run around the plant like chickens with their heads cut off.
The reason I know this stuff is because once I got off the train at Marcus Hook at midnight and had reason to go home and ask the roommate, "Clark, what does it mean when a refinery flare is bellowing like an elephant and shaking the ground like an earthquake, the fire is a hundred feet tall, and it's lighting up the night so your shadow's sharper than noon?"
He said "It means RUN LIKE HELL!"
--Charlie
At a refinery flames you see are fumes created during the refining process. It's not necessarily usable gas. The fumes can build up and cause explosions so they are burned off. There are more ecological ways to get rid of the fumes, but it's alot cheaper (free) to burn them off. However cleaner methods are being put in place these days per government requirements.
On the other hand the gas emitted from an oil well is often harnessed. If it's usable the gas can be collected and sold. But gas that comes out of an oil well is not always like the clean Natural Gas used in your stoves. It is not something that you could sell. These days the well gases are commonly pumped back into the ground where it creates pressure, helping to extract more oil. When the well is dry the gas is left safely miles under ground.
Keep in mind that making these gases usable can require more energy and create more waste.
@1, As an Albertan living near, and more specifically working in the midst of the refineries, I've often wondered about why they don't harness that energy. Even on rural tank batteries, they will often have a flare stack flaming away, illuminating the nearby fields.
A few things I do know:
- typically what they are burning is pretty poisonous (usually sour gas, which has high hydrogen sulfide concentrations).
- at refineries, if there is a "whoopsies" in the plant, they tend to send the entire process up the flare stack to prevent it from stalling and congealing in the equipment and causing further damage.
I concur with JORDAWESOME. I live in Edmonton and have several friends who are rig workers and oilfield engineers, and I have asked them that very question. The problem is that the gasses are so toxic that if you connected it to some form of generator and that system broke down at any time you would not be able to fix it.
Sour gas, which is mainly H2S (Hydrogen Sulphide) is highly toxic.
Taken from this Wikipedia article:
"Hydrogen sulfide is considered a broad-spectrum poison, meaning that it can poison several different systems in the body, although the nervous system is most affected. The toxicity of H2S is comparable with that of hydrogen cyanide."
It is a shame that the power in that gas goes to waste. I have also heard that due to impurities and varying levels of hydrocarbons in the gas the flame bursts and drops in pressure would severely damage any generating equipment you attach to it.
Better to use it for dry well extraction. BTW I am not in the oil industry, but living this close to Ft Mac you are bound to pick a few things up.
"I aim at the tower, but sometimes I hit the tank. Red Adair loves me when I do that!"
#1 I have never worked in the oilfield but grew up in the middle of one. My first reaction to your question was also H2S - the nemesis of production. Will try to confirm with my brother who's an oilfield safety trainer.
My other first thought seeing the photo was: Ah! Farmer's ingenuity meets oilfield daring-do!
(Safety regulations are a lot tighter these days, but the people haven't changed much.)
Could that guy be any more awkward with a bow and arrow?
Another little known specialty is used by power companies. When you see a power line span a canyon, how do you suppose the wire was first put into place? There is an expert who uses a special cannon to shoot a pull line. The pull line is then used to pull in a heavier drag line and finally the wire is pulled off a spool and into place.
Since someone already covered the safety necessity of the flare, I thought I'd also point out that even if natural gas exists in commercially useful amounts, the infrastructure still might not exist to do anything with it.
I visited an offshore platform where a fair amount of gas comes up with the oil, but there's no pipeline in place to transport it and it's apparently not such a huge quantity that they want to do anything with it right now. But they do run their generators from it (several megawatts worth, basically stationary jet engines) and then pump the excess back down the well to keep the pressure up. Apparently they expect to someday recover the gas, but for now they just take what they need and put the rest back.
One of the projects my company supplied parts for is a SAGD co-generation plant in Fort McMurray Alberta. Steam is pumped into the ground which separates the usable oil from the oil dirt (bitumen). When the steam comes back up it spins a turbine generating the electricity for the well's facilities and then back into the ground.
It sounds like a nice contained clean way to make the oil. Don't worry, there's still plenty of toxic waste to get rid of. Luckily the bulk of the oil sands are in the middle of an inhospitable nowhere.
So the idea is the flaming arrow only has to pass through the fumes coming out the top of the pipe - it doesn't have to stick in something or even hit anything. So it will keep going. I can't help but think that the guy with the bow better be d**n careful what's downrange of that flare stack.
My 8 year old son would LOVE that job.
Now, I don't know about y'all, but it sure looks like them Duke Boys done found the perfect occupation...
I'm confident that in these more modern times the emergency flare relighting system would be a compound crossbow with laser targeting; the payload would be remote detonated and would produce a uniform fireball two meters in diameter. And now I'm longing to build one...