Southwest Research Institute said it will collaborate with the University of Michigan to use three-dimensional printing and machine learning to create an advanced burner that will eliminate 99.5% of the methane encountered during oil production.

According to representatives with the northwest San Antonio research foundation, oil producers use flare stacks to burn off pockets of methane. But winds blowing across conventional open-flame burners lead to 40% or more of the vented gas escaping into the air, the SWRI said.

SWRI officials said the new three-year, $2.9 million partnership with the University of Michigan is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy Reducing Emissions of Methane Every Day of the Year program.

It is one of several projects funded in support of the U.S. Methane Emissions Reduction Action Plan, which seeks to reduce methane emissions, whose global warming effect is greater than that of carbon dioxide on a per-unit basis, according to a SWRI news release.

Luis Gutierrez, SWRI research engineer and project co-leader, said he, his colleagues and their UM counterparts will use “machine learning, computational fluid dynamics and additive manufacturing to create a burner capable of achieving high methane destruction efficiency and combustion stability at the challenging conditions present on the field.”

According to the SWRI, additive manufacturing involves 3D printing, and machine learning ensures a machine automatically learns from past data.

“This will be a vast improvement over today’s conventional flare technology,” Gutierrez said.

The release said the project will take advantage of the SWRI’s Metering Research Facility, which will provide realistic conditions to test the effectiveness of the new burner’s geometry. Additionally, the burners will be fabricated in the SWRI’s Metal Additive Manufacturing facilities.

“The efficacy of a flare burner to destroy methane is mainly determined by the combined characteristics of the air and natural gas. This is affected by the conditions of the field, which cannot be controlled, but also by the geometric characteristics of the burner,” Gutierrez said. “Additive manufacturing has opened the door to experiment with novel and complex burner geometries that can enhance the efficiency and robustness of the combustion process in gas flares.”