The oil companies could ask for a few more days: Wednesday will expire the month of time allowed them to present to the GSE, the Energy services manager, the candidacies for the extraction of additional methane from the old and vented Italian fields. It will be difficult to look at many new fields, which require Babylonian times and huge investments to be active. In the meantime, the Minister of Ecological Transition, Roberto Cingolani, will issue the implementing decree that will regulate the process of selling that extra gas; the decree is expected in the coming days.
Low-cost methane for businesses
The goal is to double those exhausted 3.34 billion cubic meters of methane extracted in 2021 from the Italian subsoil, to reach about 6 billion cubic meters. Extracting that little methane will be a useless effort given the Italian annual consumption of approximately 75 billion, say the usual discontents; and instead those 3 billion cubic meters more could be a precious breath of low-cost energy for the industrial sectors at greater risk of stoppage, as has already happened for the historic furnaces of Venetian Murano glass which had to go out one after the other. other for economic unsustainability.
The GSE will have to sign multi-year purchase contracts at agreed prices and, once the supply is ensured, it will have to sell that gas to the companies without gaining a margin. A reserve of at least one third of the extra methane will be destined only for small and medium-sized enterprises. The extra methane extracted will be offered at break-up prices, much lower than the ferocity of the Dutch markets.
Where are the deposits
Today, around 250-300 million cubic meters of methane are extracted each month from Italian fields, especially in Valpadana, in Val d’Agri (Potenza) and from below i f waves of the central and northern Adriatic. The minor fields, a constellation of hundreds of small pockets of gas under the entire peninsula, are under-exploited because they give a few hundred million cubic meters of gas against huge investments in research, drilling and development. But there are still important and appetizing reserves.
This is the case of the deposits in gulf of Venicecalled Alto Adriatico, no less than 30 billion cubic meters but still for fear of effects on the lagoon.