Development of a regionalized framework to evaluate high waste gas efficiency incinerators

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Natural gas venting and flaring contributes significantly to Canadian greenhouse gas emissions. In 2013, itrepresented 5% of the national emissions and 21% of the oil and gas industry emissions. Moreover, gas ventingand flaring are sources of pollutant emissions including methane, particulate soot, sulfur compounds, unburnedfuel and other by-products of combustion that can affect human health, livestock and the environment. Themain reason for gas venting and flaring are the lack of economic incentives and technical constraints. Indeed,low volumes or quality of gas extracted with oil cannot justify costly capital investments required byconventional techniques to process it. New technologies are however being developed to improve gascombustion and mitigate environmental issues related to gas venting and flaring. This is the core business ofQuestor with its clean combustion units. In this project, it is proposed to evaluate the environmental andeconomic performances of the Questor combustion technologies. The project is organized in three parts. First,air quality data collected by Questor before and after installing an high efficiency incinerator will be used tovalidate a new regionalized impact assessment method. Second, a framework compatible with the life cycleassessment method will be developed to enable implementing these regionalized data and the validatedmethod. Then, the new regionalized LCA method will be used for the environmental assessment and aneconomic analyses will be conducted in parallel. The knowledge generated in the project will provide a cleareranalysis of the added value of Questor technologies and contribute to their deployment in Canada and abroad.On the long term, it is envisaged to include social indicators in the evaluation of Questor incinerators and toidentify the parameters that mainly influence their added value depending on the context of the oil extractionsite.