For three minutes, on the day last May when Royal Dutch Shell released its first quarter earnings figures, a flame shot high into the air in front of the company’s head office in The Hague, scorching a human chain of about 40 protesters that circled it, a few meters away, to block police efforts to stamp it out.

The 15-meter, or 50-foot, tall gas flare, created by the Dutch artist Erik Hobijn, was engineered by Friends of the Earth Netherlands to protest gas flaring by Shell in Nigeria.

Major oil companies, including Shell, are feeling the heat not just from environmentalists but also from local communities, the global community and the Nigerian government, to reduce flaring in Nigeria, and so curb the carbon dioxide emissions that flaring produces.

Nigeria and Russia have long been two of the world’s largest sources of flaring, which oil field operators use as a safe means of getting rid of gas that is released as an associated byproduct of crude oil production.

Enough gas is flared in Nigeria to supply half of the power needs of sub-Saharan Africa, excluding South Africa.

Most of the flaring takes place in, and off-shore from, the oil-rich Niger Delta, where finding an economically viable use for the gas is complicated by the location of many small wells, far apart from one another in remote areas, and where a local market for gas is barely developed.

Corruption, civil unrest, and funding problems at Nigerian National Petroleum have also discouraged investment in building the infrastructure needed for collection and processing.

Statistics on gas flaring are not very reliable, data gatherers say, especially for Nigeria. Reporting is usually voluntary, and information is especially unreliable for offshore flaring.

To provide some sort of independent check on flaring data, the World Bank this year started publishing satellite photos of flaring, country by country. The satellite photo of Nigeria looks like a dense galaxy studded with bright supernova stars.

Still, some progress has been made in reducing the burn-off. “Today about 40 percent of gas is flared in Nigeria, compared to 80 percent in 1993. That’s a major improvement,” said Bent Svensson, program manager for the Global Gas Flaring Reduction Partnership at the World Bank. The partnership brings governments together with international and state-owned oil companies to search for ways to put the gas to good use, including poverty reduction.

One reason for the improvement is a progressive expansion of liquefied natural gas output since 1999, when the first production train at Shell’s Bonny Island LNG plant started commercial production. There are now six operating, with a seventh planned.

Nigeria is a second-tier source of natural gas, with proven reserves well below those of the giants, Russia, Qatar and Iran, which together hold about 70 percent of global gas resources. But, if associated gas is included, it holds about 3 percent of the world’s reserves, putting it roughly on a par with Algeria, a major exporter to Europe, according to the international gas industry information agency Cedigaz, in Paris.

Exploited collectively, the offshore waters of Nigeria and its neighbors in the Gulf of Guinea could become a major new source of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, for export, both to Europe and to the huge U.S. market.

“Nigeria, in participation with the West Africa Gas Pipeline, Equatorial Guinea and Angola, is the next big increment of LNG capacity after Qatar,” said Ian Cronshaw, head of energy diversification at the International Energy Agency in Paris.

The West Africa Gas Pipeline currently transports gas from the Niger Delta to Togo, Ghana, and Benin.

Development plans under discussion for the region include an expansion of the eight-year-old Shell Nigeria LNG production plant on Bonny Island, in the Niger Delta; an expansion of the Equatorial Guinea LNG plant on Bioko Island, where Nigeria and Cameroon have expressed an interest in joining the Marathon Oil-led consortium; and an LNG project in Angola.

If all those are realized, the Gulf of Guinea could rival the current production of the world’s largest LNG producer, Qatar, Cronshaw said.

Soaring development costs, however, may crimp these plans and thwart ambitions to turn more flared gas into the commercially profitable liquefied form.

Costs of developing liquid natural gas processing capacity have risen by around 150 percent in the past two years, driven higher by heavy demand for skilled labor, soaring shipping costs, and steep increases in the prices of construction raw materials, like copper and nickel, because of demand from China and India.

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