They are not empty caves. The storages are old deposits of gas, compact rock, such as sandstone, soaked in hydrocarbons. After being exploited to extract the impregnated methane that the rocks had stored for thousands of years, the empty fields are reused to re-inject and re-extract the gas according to need and market.
The need for new sites
An underground safe of 17 billion cubic meters of methane, or rather 13 safes of which the largest, Fiume Treste behind Vasto (Chieti), contains about 3.5 billion cubic meters of methane. Together, these invisible reservoirs buried thousands of meters deep can provide a third of Italy’s winter gas needs.
But the 13 Italian stockpiles, the second European country after Germany, are not enough; Roberto confirmed this in recent days Cingolani, outgoing Minister of Ecological Transition, Claudio Descalzi, CEO of Eni, and Stefano Venier, CEO of Snam. If that’s not enough, new ones have to be made, as in Alfonsine in Romagna, which could host 1.9 billion cubic meters, or as in a new level of the Abruzzo storage Fiume Treste, which is multilayered like a millefeuille cake.
The 13 Italian storages
In Italy, 13 gas stores are operational. Nine of the Snam through the subsidiary Stogit, three are fromEdison and one of the group’s independent Ital Gas Storage company F2i. The activity is on behalf of third parties because these companies do not own the gas they store; they perform a service according to the tariffs regulated by the Arera energy authority. Snam is first in Europe with 15% of capacity (3.5% of the world).
These reserves play a key role in energy security because they allow to balance the market between supply and demand, especially in winter when methane is burned 3 or 4 times more than in summer, and guarantee supply. These days the filling level of the Italian storage system is 93%.