Regulation & Environment

摘要

Flying over southern Iraq at night, those with window seats can hardly miss the dramatic sight of hundreds of thousands of Mcf/d of natural gas being burned at the country's biggest oil fields. The batteries of gas flares at the Rumaila, Zubair and Qurna-1 fields light up the sky like a full-fledged environmental disaster, which in some sense is exactly what it is-as well as an economic one. The flares disperse fine soot particles into the atmosphere, along with asthma-inducing gases such as sulfur dioxide which, if not inhaled first by unfortunate humans or livestock, are eventually brought to earth in the form of acid rain.