Application of New Technologies for Flare Gas Reduction in Iran, an Environmental Cost-Benefit Analysis

The large volumes of flared gas in Iran, leads to waste of energy reserves, loss of potential income and significant environmental pollution. In order to avoid gas flaring, the use of new technologies is necessary, in Iran as the world’s third gas flaring country. In this paper, an overview of new gas technologies has been provided and the cost-benefit analysis of utilizing gas to liquids technology has been conducted on flare gas in exploited‎ phases of “South-Pars” gas field refineries using COMFAR III software. The results show that application of gas to liquids technology in Iran for this purpose is economically justified with high net present value (NPV) and considerable internal rate of return (IRR) as the economic evaluation criteria. Since environmental effects, social costs of pollutions and benefits of emissions reduction are included in environmental cost-benefit Analysis, valuation of the project has been also done considering the mentioned factors.