This paper highlights the achievements made by Zakum Development Company (ZADCO) towards meeting the zero flaring strategic objective of ADNOC (Abu Dhabi National Oil Company). By the end of 2005 it is anticipated that ZADCO will have achieved 95% of the zero flaring objective. Flare reduction technologies utilised by ZADCO are presented as part of the path to zero flaring. The path to zero flaring requires a number of technologies and approaches including initial substantial gains through gas re-injection, to later more innovative approaches such as sour gas recovery that require the careful evaluation of project economics and a range of design alternatives. This paper features the sour gas recovery project at Zirku Island where ZADCO currently flares a predominantly acid gas stream considered to be harmful to the environment and human health. The sour gas recovery project involves the design of a compression system that avoids reducing oil production at Upper Zakum and Satah offshore facilities and eradicates the need for flaring through export of the sour gas to a sulphur recovery unit in Das Island. Increased production reliability provided the main business case for investing in environmental improvement. The unique feature of the compression system is that it is designed to have two operating scenarios; a low pressure compression mode and a high pressure operating mode. The design of the system incorporated special features to address the problems of interaction between the high and low pressure modes of operation. These included protection, isolation, drainage and control system configuration. These features are described in detail in the paper. Introduction ZADCO is a major oil and gas company operating in the Arab Gulf region. Oil produced from offshore fields is sent to Zirku Island via a subsea pipeline for stabilization and export. Although the situation is expected to change and necessary measures are at hand, the crude is basically sweet. Original design concept in 1970's was based on a liberal view to flaring. Large amounts of gases were flared. However, with the recent policies adopted by the Company to reduce flaring to the absolute minimum (target being zero flaring) a number of steps were taken to achieve this objective as elaborated in the following sections. Process Description 1)Original design - Pre 1995: Figure 1 shows a block flow diagram of the original Zirku Island facilities. These consist of two adjacent plants, Upper Zakum (UZ) and Satah Plants. The UZ plant handles about 500 KBOPD via a subsea pipeline from the offshore Zakum field. Dehydration and desalting of the crude is followed by stabilization resulting in the release of large quantities of essentially sweet gases. In the gas treatment section condensate stabilization takes place. This is re-injected in the crude. Gas above fuel requirements is flared. In Satah Plant a similar set of operations are performed with one important difference. Satah crude is a sour crude with 7% H2S. The Majority of the gas separated in this plant is flared although an amine unit is used to treat the low pressure gas, thereby small amount of sweet gas are recovered. All in all about 40-45 MMSCFD of gas, depending on throughput, is flared.