Amidst the urgent climate challenges (1)  faced by Iraq’s 43 million residents (2), the country’s oil industry is intensifying the crisis by failing to end a wasteful practice known as “gas flaring.” This process, which involves burning off the natural gas that surfaces with crude oil, wastes a valuable energy resource and releases dangerous pollutants into the atmosphere, harming the environment and the health of downwind communities.

Every year, Iraq burns huge quantities of natural gas from as many as 1,400 flares because the country does not have the infrastructure to capture and process this byproduct of oil operations. Over the last decade, as Iraq ramped up oil production, the amount of flared gas surged, reaching 423 billion cubic feet (bcf) by 2013 and 565 bcf in 2015. By 2019, the volume of flared gas jumped to 632 bcf, making Iraq, for several years, the second-largest source of flared natural gas after Russia, according to the World Bank. (3)  Available data shows that these volumes remained steady through at least 2022, as shown below.

While flaring is intended to burn all the natural gas being released by Iraq’s oil extraction, that is almost never the case, causing dangerous levels of “fugitive methane” to escape into the atmosphere. This happens due to venting, leaks, incomplete combustion during flaring, and accidents associated with the country’s poor energy infrastructure. In August 2021, satellites detected a huge plume of methane gas over southern Iraq that was likely the result of a pipeline leak that was spewing an estimated 130 tons of methane per hour—equivalent to the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by 6,500 cars running for a year.