Turkmenistan urged to plug gas leaks driving climate change

Over the past half-century, the former Soviet republic has been grappling with a hellish leak it simply cannot plug.

Deep in the desert of Karakoum, in northern Turkmenistan, the Darvaza gas crater has been ablaze for the past 50 years, pumping fearsome quantities of methane gas into the atmosphere.

Dubbed the “Gateway to Hell”, the gaping crater has long been a rare tourist hot spot in a country where foreign visitors number about 6,000 a year.

With methane’s greenhouse effects increasingly in the spotlight, the gas-belching desert oddity has also attracted growing scrutiny from scientists and governments scrambling for ways to rein in catastrophic global warming.

A Soviet desert mystery

At 70 metres (229ft) wide and 20 metres deep, the smouldering Darvaza Crater is a surreal sight in an otherwise barren landscape. Its origin remains one of the former Soviet Union’s best-kept secrets.

The most widely accepted account points to a drilling operation gone awry back in 1971.  

Soviet engineers, the story goes, were gauging the site’s oil reserves when they hit a gas cavern, causing the earth to collapse and releasing vast quantities of natural gas. With the site both hazardous and inoperable, the engineers decided to set it alight, planning to exhaust the cavern’s gas reserves in a matter of weeks – or so they thought. 

But there are other theories, too.  

In 2013, explorer George Kourounis became the first person to plumb the depths of the crater. In an interview with National Geographic, he said local geologists had offered different accounts regarding the crater’s formation. 

“I’ve heard (…) that the collapse may have happened in the 1960s and that it went unlit until 1980s,” Kourounis said. “It’s hard for me to back that up, but this is basically straight from the horse’s mouth.” 

Tip of the iceberg 

Since Turkmenistan’s independence in 1991, the government has regularly floated plans to extinguish the “Gateway to Hell”.  

“We are losing valuable natural resources for which we could get significant profits and use them for improving the well-being of our people,” the country’s former strongman leader Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov said at the start of 2022, shortly before handing power to his son. 

In reality, this titanic enterprise has never really been a priority for a country that sits on abundant oil and gas reserves – enough to provide free electricity, gas and water to its citizens over the three decades that followed independence. 

This time, however, the reclusive central Asian country appears determined to snuff out the blaze, with help from the United States. 

In late March, Bloomberg reported that the two countries were discussing a plan to extinguish the fire and capture the methane released by the crater. The plan would also see Washington provide much-needed investment in the country’s ageing oil and gas infrastructure.  

While the spectacular “Gateway to Hell” has attracted most attention over the years, experts note that the Darvaza Crater is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to gas leaks in Turkmenistan, one of the world’s top polluters despite a population of just six million.  

Between 2019 and 2022, the country set an unflattering world record of 840 “super-emitter” events involving methane gas leaks from wells, storage sites and pipelines, according to satellite data supplied by the French start-up Karryos, whose efforts to monitor methane emissions around the world have exposed the staggering environmental cost of Turkmenistan’s oil and gas industry. 

An environmental nightmare 

Last year, methane leaks from Turkmenistan’s two main fossil fuel fields caused more global warming than the entire carbon emissions of the United Kingdom, Karryos data revealed. 

“Until recently, we had little or no visibility on the subject,” said the start-up’s founder Antoine Rostand. “Now we know that Turkmenistan, but also Iraq, the United States and Russia, are among the countries whose oil and gas sector emit the largest quantities of methane.” 

In Turkmenistan’s case, Rostand said the problem stemmed from a lack environmental standards and poor infrastructure maintenance. He noted that leaked natural gas is almost 100 times more polluting than flared – or burnt – methane. 

Methane is the second most abundant gas in the atmosphere after CO2, and although it is less persistent in the air, its warming potential is around 80 times greater over a 20-year period. Leaks from fossil fuel installations sometimes stretch over several weeks, amounting to…