What Is a Flare Stack?
A flare stack refers to an elevated vertical stack used for burning off unusable waste gas in a variety of applications.
Flare stacks, or flare systems, are a tower, used to burn off unusable waste gases with carefully controlled combustion. It’s incredibly important for the environment that those gases don’t make it into the atmosphere, so the efficiency of flare stacks are heavily regulated. We’ve engineered some of the best.
Flaring Standards & Regulations
What You need to Know
In Canada, the National Standard of Canadian Regulations for Flaring, CSA Z620.3, require that all flares achieve 98% Combustion or Conversion Efficiency, which means that at least 98% of the harmful gases and toxins have been eliminated by the flare stack.
In the USA, the Environmental Protection Agency regulations from the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), specifically 40 CFR 60.18 and 63.670 require:
WHy Choose Us
Compliance-Driven Design, Built for Your Needs
Every flare we build is custom designed, engineered, and manufactured to suit you. We’re also some of the world’s foremost experts in combustions systems as a whole, and we offer, not only flares systems, but also arrestors, enclosed combustion systems, and ignition systems.
This means we have the expertise and perspective to ensure our custom flares can flawlessly integrate into your system, eliminating the weaknesses that standardized flare stacks and systems from other manufacturers will give you. This is particularly important since those weaknesses can result in violations of Destruction Removal Efficiency regulations.
Learn about our services as flare stack engineers.
Types of Flare Stacks We Build
Utility Flares
Our utility flares are an economical solution for emergency shut down applications, compressor blowdowns, pigging, and cases where smoke emissions may not be a concern.
Air-Assisted Flares
Our air-assisted flare stacks are designed to eliminate smoke emissions when combusting heavy hydrocarbons.
Steam-Assisted Flares
Our steam-assisted flare stacks are designed to combust heavy hydrocarbons with no smoke emissions. These are a great choice when there is a source of high-pressure steam available on site.
Gas-Assisted Flares
Our High Pressure and Low-Pressure gas-assisted flare stack designs can eliminate smoke (HP Gas-Assist) or sour gas odours (LP Gas-Assist).
Sonic Flares
Our sonic flare stacks make use of available high pressures in waste gas to create turbulence, which enhances the combustion process in high-volume flaring projects. With no assist medium necessary, sonic flares have several key benefits, including minimal radiation, lower operating costs, and a shorter flare height.
Velocity Seal
In flare stacks with little to no process flow, there’s always a risk of air entering the flare tip and working its way down the stack to the flare header, causing explosions, severely damaging your equipment and potentially harming your employees.
Modular Flares
We’ll never discount the value of customization in combustion systems. It ensures that every component of your equipment is working together to give you the best results. But we understand that custom work can come with longer lead times, depending on what you need. Which is why we developed our modular flare stacks.
Our modular flare stacks are designed with several flanges and tabs where you can replace and add parts easily. This means we can keep an inventory of the most common parts and modify them to suit you when you need a flare more quickly than a fully customized model would allow. They’re more cost-effective than our custom models but are flexible enough to be easily converted to suit different types of flares on-site. The best part? We can manufacture them two times faster than a custom flare.
They aren’t right for everyone, but they might be right for you.