Gas flaring : an overall analysis and a multicriteria approach to alternatives selection

During the last years the problem of gas flaring has become increasingly important in the eyes of the international community: on one hand, satellites allowed to make an estimation of the amounts of flared gas, making clear the enormous waste of resources that this practice constitutes; on the other hand, the ever stronger interest aimed at sustainable development underlines the fact that recovering associated gas could lead not only to economic advantages, but also to environmental and social ones. This is true especially for low developed countries, where the lack of access to energy is often one of the main obstacles to development. Suitable technologies to collect and make use of associated gas are many, but very often, in a project aimed to reduce or eliminate gas flaring, the greatest difficulties concern the fact of finding an agreement among the various stakeholders and of selecting an alternative reaching the best degree of sustainability. Hence, this work aims to show how these difficulties could be softened using the support of a decision-making method based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process once an appropriate set of indicators allowing to evaluate and to compare different alternatives has been defined. Moreover, an application of the model to a real case allowed to underline its principal strenghts and weaknesses, leading to the conclusion that a selection among different alternatives based only on economic factors does not necessary leads to identify the alternative that gives best performances in terms of sustainability.