Shale Oil - The Hidden Pollution

Shale oil is booming or at least it is in America.  It is an Industrial Revolution that is now visible from space.  Not because the facilities needed are hundreds of acres across, which is what I expected to be told.  No, the reason that it can now been seen from space is because each and every shale oil field burns off 'unwanted' gas.

'Unwanted'?  I have to admit that I thought it was a funny way of putting it, considering the size of the gas bill I had to help pay last winter, up by eight per cent and the highest quarterly bills came out in January.  They could send some of that 'unwanted' natural gas in my direction.

However, when you extract oil, even shale oil, which is mixed with a lot of sand, natural gas comes up with it but it's uneconomic to capture it and then pipe it away to storage  so the easiest thing is to burn it off.  Oh and guess what?  America isn't even the worse for burning off!  Russia is the biggest burner and Nigeria, the second, burns off the equivalent of the UK's yearly gas use every three months!

So while everybody with a heart and a soul and a dose of humanity is struggling to decrease the effect humans have on the planet, the oil industry is farting out enough green house gases to heat up the planet faster than anything before.  Kind of makes you wonder why you bother, doesn't it?  Granted I wouldn't want to sink down to the level of the industries that put profit and ease before the worth of the planet.  That and the fact that there are people and industries who are working to drop their imprint on the environment.  For example the landfill dump site that, instead of just letting the methane produced by all that rotting waste dissipate into the atmosphere, pipes off the gas to a power station where it is used to produce electricity.  And as far as I know they receive some money for that.

I wonder, has America ever considered the amount of money it would receive doing that with it's 'unwanted' shale oil gas?