Unfinished Flare Project

I started this draft April 16th, 2019. Never got back to it.

I had been playing with the idea of documenting the flaring that’s going on in the Permian Basin. When production was hight there was so much natural gas that it actually had a negative price for a while, meaning that producers had to pay people to come get it. There’s no pipeline capacity for the stuff. No storage. No reason to hold onto it so they flare it on site.

I wanted to document this. But I started working for TAPPS more and more and I felt guilty about leaving my wife to take care of our daughter by herself with another child on the way.

So I let it go.

I made these while on a visit to my Dad in Midland last April. Just took the car out and drove around looking for flares. I could see plenty, the trick was getting close enough in the dark to be able to get a photograph safely. These were all taken outside of Stanton, Texas.

Below, A center-pivot irrigation system with flares in the background in Martin County, TX. The orange glow comes from four different flares on the horizon. The red lights near the horizon in the lower right are the tops of windmills in the distance. I liked this location because of the contrast of different ways of working the land out here. Oil production (when utilizing fracking, which is common during this boom) consumes a lot of water. I thought it was interesting to see irrigation for crops right next to producing wells.

These images were made with a 14mm lens for the wide shots and a combination of a canon 70-200 2.8 and an old (borrowed) Nikon 300mm f/4.