The Order to Put Out the Fire
In 2010, and again in 2022, the president of Turkmenistan ordered the burning gas crater at Darvaza extinguished, and it is still alight. It is also, by an enormous margin, the least significant thing leaking methane in the country.
The hole sits eight kilometres off the north road through the Karakum, across sand soft enough that you need the four-wheel drive to reach it. In daylight it is an unremarkable depression, usually given as about seventy metres across and thirty deep, though the published figures vary and nobody official has ever confirmed one. The rim is warm. Small flames come out of the walls in a few hundred places, and the air above it shakes. Then the light goes and the thing becomes what the photographs promise: an orange bowl in a black desert, loud, visible from the highway, with nothing else lit for fifty kilometres in any direction.
It has been burning for somewhere between forty and sixty years, and the head of state has twice instructed the government to put it out. In April 2010 Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov visited and ordered the crater closed. In January 2022 he went on television and ordered it again, citing the waste of a valuable resource, the damage to the environment and the effect on the health of people living nearby. Both orders were reported worldwide. The fire is still there. What is interesting is not the failure — sealing a burning gas field is genuinely hard — but the choice of target.
Nobody can say when it was lit
The story every guide tells, and every article repeats, is that Soviet geologists drilled here in 1971, the rig collapsed into a cavern, and the engineers set the escaping gas alight expecting it to burn out in a few weeks. It is a good story and there is no Soviet document behind it. No drilling report, no accident record, no dated photograph from the period has been produced. Turkmen geologists who have spoken about it, including those quoted by the Canadian explorer George Kourounis when he mounted an expedition here, put the collapse in the 1960s and the ignition somewhere in the 1980s, which would make the whole 1971 chronology wrong by a decade or two in each direction. Kourounis descended to the floor of the crater in November 2013 in a heat-reflective suit on a Kevlar line, the only person known to have done it, and brought back soil in which bacteria were living at temperatures that should have sterilised it. He did not bring back a date.
What the orders actually said
The 2010 instruction produced nothing visible. In 2018 the crater was given an official name, the Shining of the Karakum, which is the sort of thing a state does to a landmark it intends to keep. The 2022 instruction was more specific, and it was followed by work: wells drilled around the crater to draw the gas off before it reaches the surface. In mid-2024, at a gas conference in the country, a director of the state company Turkmengaz told delegates that the flame had been reduced substantially — the figure given was roughly threefold. Visitors since have reported a smaller fire than the one in the older photographs, and no independent measurement exists either way. That is the state of the record: an order, some drilling, a claim at a conference.
If methane is going to escape at all, burning it is the least bad way for that to happen — fire is what turns it into something roughly eighty times less harmful. The gas nobody is ordered to deal with is the gas that never catches fire.
The crater is not the leak
Turkmenistan is usually ranked fourth in the world by proven natural gas reserves, behind Russia, Iran and Qatar, and Galkynysh in the south-east is among the largest single fields anywhere. It is also, on the satellite evidence, the largest source of methane leaked into the atmosphere from fossil fuel operations of any country on earth. Analysis of satellite readings published in 2023 put the emissions from the country's two main fossil fuel fields at around 2.6 and 1.8 million tonnes of methane in 2022 — figures the government disputes, and which are estimates derived from orbit rather than meter readings, but which no counter-measurement has been offered against. Methane traps roughly eighty times as much heat as carbon dioxide over twenty years. Set against that, the crater is arithmetically trivial, and it is trivial in the direction that helps: gas that burns leaves as carbon dioxide, while gas that vents leaves as methane. The photogenic fire is the well-behaved one.
Why the fields leak
The leaks are not a policy. They are an inheritance and an economics problem. The gathering network across the Amu Darya basin and the west is largely Soviet-built, with compressor stations, valves and flanges that have been weeping since before independence, and the cheapest way to service any of it has always been to vent the line rather than flare or recover. Repair costs money, and the money has been thin in a specific way: Turkmenistan sells almost all of its gas to one customer, China, through the Central Asia–China pipeline that opened at the end of 2009, on terms the country does not publish and did not negotiate from strength. Russia stopped buying for three years from 2016 and resumed at reduced volumes. The pipeline through Afghanistan to Pakistan and India has been under construction since 2015 and does not deliver. Domestically, gas was free to households from 1993 until the subsidy was ended at the start of 2019, which is a long time to teach a country that the stuff has no price.
The visible metre
Turkmenistan announced at COP28 in December 2023 that it would join the Global Methane Pledge, and has since signed cooperation arrangements on leak detection with American and European partners. Whether that produces repaired valves is a question that satellites will answer within a few years, and the answer will be checkable, which is unusual for anything in this country. Meanwhile the crater keeps its orders. It is the one image of Turkmenistan that people outside it recognise, and closing it would be an act performed entirely in public — measurable by anyone with a photograph, unlike a compressor station in the Amu Darya basin that nobody will ever be driven to see. There is a fair argument, made by people in Ashgabat as well as outside it, that the crater is worth keeping precisely because it is the only thing that brings visitors into the Karakum at all. There is a better one: that for fifteen years the state has been issuing instructions about one thirty-metre hole in the sand while the actual problem sits under a field the size of a county, and that the difference between the two is the whole story.