Russia is burning natural gas into the air at the border. The fire can be seen from Finland.
According to satellite images of the NASA fire monitoring system, flames have been burning at the Portova compressor station of the Russian company Gazprom every day since June 17.
Residents of the Virolakhti municipality also told journalists that they saw the fire raging across the Russian border.
This may indicate that it is already difficult for Russia to store the extracted gas, and they began to simply burn it there.
According to the Minister of Energy of Ukraine Herman Galushchenko, such processes show that Western sanctions continue to bind Russians.
"Instead of earning billions of euros from supplies, the Russians are forced to simply burn the extracted gas into the air. The blackmailers are already feeling the damage and the time period when they can still dictate their terms is rapidly decreasing," he wrote on Facebook and added that the West must maintain the sanctions regime and strengthen it even more.
pyr666 on August 5th, 2022 at 06:53 UTC »
that's a proper method for disposing of gas, assuming they can't contain it. burning destroys most of the bad stuff in the gas and is better than just venting into the air.
good odds they can't not produce the gas, too. that happens a lot in heavy industry.
Gentosaur1 on August 5th, 2022 at 01:32 UTC »
I’m an environmental engineer who works with oil and gas and it’s actually way more environmentally friendly to burn natural gas than to simply exhaust it into the atmosphere. Most of the time, burning gas removes about 98% of the really volatile pollutants within the stream.
Edit - this is not me being pro-Russia. This is just me saying that flaring off natural gas is a practice held within the industry. A lot of refineries do it as a safety measure and most gas wells do it as an economic measure and I’m just trying to help spread some general awareness since most people don’t know much about environmental science. Also, just because environmentally friendly practices exist doesn’t mean they’re “good” for the environment. They’re just significantly better than the worst case scenario of a facility operating without any regulations.
Kitakitakita on August 5th, 2022 at 00:13 UTC »
Finland should make a giant fan and blow it towards them