Flaring Maps

Flaring Maps is a free web application and dataset from SkyTruth, a US nonprofit, that shows where natural gas is flared worldwide, how often and in what volume. Routine flaring burns gas produced alongside crude oil at wells, offshore platforms, refineries and compressor stations. It wastes energy, releases CO₂, NOₓ and black carbon, and is often inconsistently self-reported.

The tool is built on Nightfire detections from the VIIRS instrument aboard NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite, processed by the Earth Observation Group (EOG) at the Colorado School of Mines, which also produces the annual flared-volume estimates. The heatmap clusters detections in space and time to show the annual density of flaring sites from 2012 onward, weighted by flaring temperature, so persistent hotspots stand out from short bursts. The volume map estimates flared gas in billion cubic metres per site and year. Users can summarise volumes for countries, Canadian provinces, US states, counties and federal lands, or for an area they draw or upload as GeoJSON, and download the figures. Data are refreshed annually; 2024 data were added in August 2025.

SkyTruth states the data come from satellite observations, not operator disclosures, and are not a regulatory inventory. Intended users include communities, researchers, journalists and policymakers. InfoAmazonia's Every Last Drop investigation used the maps and historical datasets to examine flaring's environmental and public-health impacts, and in 2026 Climate Home News worked with SkyTruth on a decade of flaring data showing rising flaring at former Shell fields in the Niger Delta. Data are licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 for environmental conservation use only.