Burning Skies: Behind Big Oil’s Toxic Flames

The consortium, supported by 14 other media partners, spent over a year investigating flaring emissions emitted across 18 countries between 2012 and 2022, in what comes as the largest investigation to date on this topic.

Flaring, which consists in burning natural gas as part of the fossil fuel supply chain, is a key driver of climate change and comes at catastrophic costs for local biospheres and populations alike.  

In an hybrid approach of data work and field reporting, the consortium reveals that flaring emissions are largely under-estimated by the current international standards - and sometimes even under-reported by multinationals themselves, such as the Big Oil’s giants such as BP, TotalEnergies and ENI.  

Oxpeckers, Daraj and their partners – Al-Mirbad, Twala and NIRIJ – used this unique dataset on gas flaring estimates to visit key “superemitting” licences and further document the devastuous consequences for exposed local population on the ground, in Angola, Iraq, Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria.  

According to the World Bank and the U.S. Energy Information Administration, investments worth 200 billion dollars of investments are needed to put an end to raw methane emissions and end routine flaring. This would only 5% of the 4 trillions dollars of profits made by the global fossil fuel sector in 2022.  

Meanwhile, flaring keeps on, with 38 millions tons of CO2 equivalent emitted worldwide in 2023 - more than the annual emissions of a country such as France for the previous year.

Photo: A burning flare on the side of the road in Shaikan province, Iraq (c) Network of Iraqi Reporters for Investigative Journalism (NIRIJ) & DARAJ