“The focus on methane is wrong, so there will be no transition.”

Enrico Gagliano teaches at the Department of Civil, Chemical, Environmental and Materials Engineering at the University of Bologna. It is part of the Energy for the Future group, coordinated by Professors Vincenzo Balzani and Nicola Armaroli, which already in 2014 sent a letter to the Renzi government to indicate that “the end of the fossil fuel era is inevitable”. Almost ten years later, he faced the Draghi and Meloni governments’ plan to expand natural gas consumption.

Is it reasonable for a European country to invest in new “heavy” infrastructure to increase methane supplies?

of course not. Let’s start from the consequences of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict: the policies of diversifying energy supply sources (especially gas) in Italy led to the intensification of relations with politically unstable countries, which are likely to be hostile and far from our concept of democracy (such as Algeria, Libya, Azerbaijan), and the assessment of the possibility of building infrastructures New. It’s like wanting to treat a disease (gas addiction) with the same disease (more gas). According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), oil and gas operations are the largest source of emissions from the energy sector. In 2022, gas companies could cut methane losses by 75% by spending less than 2% of their 2022 income. For years, the US nongovernmental organization Clear Air Task Force (Catf) has documented methane emissions from many gas storage and distribution facilities In Italy, however, these do not stop. Priority must be given to regulations and controls that prevent such waste.

What are the risks involved in an increase in the availability/supply of methane for environmental transformation?

Confidence in the unlimited availability of methane threatens to delay the achievement of energy and climate goals set by the European Union and international agreements. Methane is a short-lived climate pollutant, with an atmospheric lifetime of about a decade, and is a greenhouse gas 10 times more potent than carbon dioxide at warming the atmosphere. It is also the second most important human greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide (570 million tons/year). According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, methane reduction is the biggest opportunity to slow global warming between now and 2040. Human-made methane emissions are responsible for 25% of global warming. The extraction, processing and distribution of oil and gas account for 23% of emissions. Methane mitigation could reduce temperatures by about 0.3°C over the next two decades, avoid 255,000 premature deaths, and avert 26 million tons of crop losses from wheat, soybeans, corn and rice.

Could the recent agreement between the European Union and Norway on certain supplies of methane gas render obsolete the infrastructures that look to the Mediterranean, even before they are built?

The construction of new infrastructures in the Mediterranean is an integral part of the so-called Matti Plan, of the most forewarned Descalzi plan (by Claudio, recently reconfirmed for the fourth time at the helm of Eni), which President Meloni must present in October and can Also enrich it by doubling the transport capacity of the tap that reaches Puglia. However, it is likely that gas consumption will gradually decrease over the next 25-30 years until it becomes zero. In such a scenario, will there be enough space for the infrastructures of a reliable and democratic Norway and for the infrastructure of Descalzy’s plan? 15-20 years of amortization of gas pipeline construction costs is a very long period in which many variables can play for or against the economic sustainability of the investment.

For years, the journal Nature has called on us to consider the need to keep already discovered methane reserves underground, and therefore to stop drilling. Is Italy adapting?

The study by Christophe McGlade and Paul Ekins dates back to 2015. Since then the volumes of gas extracted in Italy have fallen because corporate interests, Eni at the fore, have looked beyond national borders, even if Sblocca Italia in its first edition (November 2014) was on the open New areas for hydrocarbon exploration activities. The Nature paper was published while we were in Italy in the midst of the No Triv referendum season, which forced the majority of the Renzi government to ban new research and extraction activities at sea less than 12 nautical miles from the coast that culminated in the April 2016 referendum. This ban was a temporary buffer . The approval of the Plan for Sustainable Energy Transition in the Appropriate Regions (PiTESAI), which took place after three years of ordeal and without the participation of local self-governments, should have finally regulated exploration and research activities, but the Draghi government, with a partner from the regions, only agreed to a set of Evaluation criteria, which gave the effects of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict an excuse to disavow it, allowing gas exploration and cultivation less than 12 nautical miles from the coast. Meanwhile, we witnessed the automatic renewal of expired concessions – especially those in Val d’Agri and in the upper Adriatic so dear to Eni – under a mechanism wanted by the Monti government that could have been canceled by decree.