Flared gas: the money that burns at the top of the derrick
On oilfields the world over, a flame burns day and night at the top of a mast. It has a name — the flare — and a cost: in 2025, the equivalent of Africa’s entire annual gas consumption went up in smoke.
The figures of the latest global flaring report (World Bank, GGFR) fit in one sentence: 167 billion m³ of natural gas flared in 2025 — a third consecutive year of increase — that is $54 billion of destroyed energy, roughly the annual gas consumption of the entire African continent. Nine countries account for more than 80 % of those flames. To understand why this waste exists, and why it is not inevitable, you have to look at what a flare really is.
Why burn a product that is worth money?
Oil never comes up alone: almost every barrel rises with associated gas. That gas is a product — it heats, it lights, it drives turbines and fertiliser plants. But it does not travel by truck: it needs a pipeline, a processing plant or a customer on site. When none of the three exists, the operator has only two possible moves: release the gas as it is — methane, with a warming power far above CO₂ — or burn it. The flare is the lesser of two evils. It is also the admission of a failure: flared gas is gas without an outlet.
What the flame really costs
$54 billion a year is the price of the destroyed energy — before counting the carbon and methane released. The report adds an even more striking number: eliminating routine flaring would cost $70–100 billion of investment. Less than two years of burnt gas would pay for the end of the burning. And it is no utopia: Kazakhstan has cut its flaring by 87 % since 2012. The flame goes out when you build it an outlet.
And in Chad?
The Chadian basin is no exception: associated gas is burnt there for lack of an outlet, and the Sédigui gas field (~7 bn m³ documented) has slept since its discovery — gas without an outlet has no price. This is exactly layer 1 of the price of a bag of urea: while the world pays for its ammonia at crisis-priced gas, Chad burns or leaves its own asleep.
Putting the flare out by plugging it in
EnerTchad’s answer lives in the value chains this site describes: plug the gas into a turbine (gas-to-power, 125 MW target, micro-grids), into a bottle (the LPG of “the bottle against the axe”), into a plant (gas → ammonia → urea/NPK). Every molecule plugged in is a molecule that does not burn — that is the meaning of the “zero routine flaring” commitment and the LDAR programme (−92 % fugitive emissions targeted) published on our impact page. The flare is not part of oil’s scenery: it is a meter displaying, in real time, the value a country has not yet decided to keep.
Flaring figures: Global Gas Flaring Tracker (World Bank/GGFR), 2025 data. EnerTchad S.A. is an OHADA-law company in formation; the value chains discussed are targets.
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