Fracking Hell

This Global Flaring Visualization is an animated map showing nightly, infrared satellite detected natural gas flaring across the world.

For cost reasons oil producers frequently flare methane and other gases produced by oil wells rather than recover the gases. This flaring adds huge amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere and the gases themselves can often pollute the air.

The map uses data collected by NOAA’s Suomi NPP satellite to show a nightly global snapshot of natural gas flaring over the last five months. Identifiable hot-spots on the map include flaring from the Bakken shale formation in North Dakota and the huge natural gas flaring in Russia and the Middle East.