But, as I said from the start, it is not all.
There is another story to tell, and then the two stories will have to be put together. I found out the "methane" problem not in Internet, but reading an article in "Scientific American" (translated in Italian: "Scienze") in the second half of the seventies. The oil crisis of 1974 was still strongly felt, and this was an interesting subject for mass-media who dealt with energy problems. In Scientific American, the magazine, there were also a lot of articles on this subject.

One of these, was about the quantity of oil that had been already extracted from the beginning of the oil extraction era up to that period. Once this quantity had been found, there was a short parenthesis saying that, if that was the right quantity, as much methane gas had been burnt at its coming out from the top of the drilling pylons (the same quantity in terms of calories burning oil).

The drilling pylons, with a high flame on top, are typical of the oil areas everywhere: that same flame is the methane gas burning. I remember another article appeared in the same magazine in that period, showing Earth images taken at night from the sky.

It was possible to see in the Libyan territory a strong light in a certain area such as those we see in presence of big cities. They were, on the contrary, in the middle of the Sahara desert, the oil fields of this northern African country. But why do they extract so much methane gas and burn it immediately afterwards? To understand this problem we can use as reference notions found in any children's encyclopaedia.

Oil fields are usually made of three layers: going upwards, the first layer is made of water. On the water there is the oil, lighter and floating. The last layer toward the Earth's surface is the methane, that being gas is lighter than oil. We do not have to think of these oil fields as underground lakes, but as liquids or gases that soak porous rocks with the same consistency of the sand or gravel. When a perforation drill intercepts the oil layer at a hundred of meters of depth avoids taking the water, the lowest layer, but it is not possible to avoid methane gas coming to the surface with the oil.

At the beginning of the oil era, in the 19th century, as there was no technology to keep the methane and as methane mixed with air makes a highly explosive mixture, the only possible solution was to burn the gas as it came to the surface. The fact is that even today possibly three quarters of the methane gas extracted with oil is still burnt.

But we are not in the 19th century anymore: we are in the 20th!! Today we do have all the technologies and the infrastructures we need to use methane. And not only this. Methane, as a fuel for heating and electric energy production is better than oil for the simple reason that is not so polluting. Furthermore, once built the methane pipelines it can be transported at lower costs and without environmental risks.

It is therefore really amazing that we go on discussing in the most important international congresses of the green house effects, and we do not even touch the subject of all the methane (a clean fuel) that goes on being extracted to be immediately and uselessly burnt in the air. Public opinion has never been informed of the largest waste of resources of our history, at least in Italy for sure.

In the last 20 years in Italy no one has ever talked of methane in this way, and no one, neither the TV or the newspaper or the environmental groups have ever informed our public opinion. I can say this as I was there, I watched TV and I read the newspapers. Why has no one ever talked of this problem? Why with all the environment congresses and the environment parties has such a problem never come to the public attention?