I was putting together our family pub quiz this week and stumbled on a question that completely blew my mind. It was about this place in Turkmenistan officially called the Darvaza gas crater, but it’s also known as the "Gateway to Hell." The name alone had me hooked, and once I started reading about it, I realised it’s one of those insane real-world stories that perfectly captures the waste and unintended consequences of our fossil fuel age.

Back in 1971, a team of Soviet geologists were drilling out in the Karakum Desert, pretty much in the middle of nowhere. They were looking for natural gas, and they thought they’d hit a decent pocket of it. Turns out, they’d actually drilled right into a massive underground cavern that was just full of the stuff. The ground gave way, swallowing their drilling rig and leaving behind a gigantic crater. To make matters worse, it immediately started spewing methane gas, a huge problem for the environment and for anyone living nearby.

Faced with this uncontrollable leak, the engineers made a call that probably seemed logical at the time: they decided to set it on fire. Their thinking was that it would burn off the dangerous gas in a few weeks and then fizzle out. The only problem? They had no idea how much fuel was down there. That was over 50 years ago, and the crater is still burning today. It’s a literal pit of fire that’s been roaring non-stop since the Nixon administration, which is just wild to think about.

When you look at it from an energy and climate perspective, the whole thing is a total nightmare. Before they lit it, the crater was just venting pure methane directly into the air. Since methane is an incredibly powerful greenhouse gas (way more potent than CO2 in the short term) burning it was actually the lesser of two evils. But the lesser evil is still pretty evil. They estimate this thing burns through about 20 billion cubic feet of natural gas every single year. That translates to roughly 300,000 tons of CO2 emissions annually, which is comparable to the yearly output of an entire small country.

It’s become a weird tourist attraction over the years, which adds another layer of irony. The government has occasionally talked about putting it out, and a few years back the president even made a big show of saying it needed to be extinguished to stop the environmental damage and save the lost resource. But snuffing out a fire that’s been fed by a bottomless gas supply for five decades is way easier said than done. They’ve looked into everything from dumping massive amounts of sand on it to pumping in inert gases, but so far, nothing’s worked. The Gateway to Hell just keeps on burning.

For a community like ours that’s focused on clean energy and smarter solutions, this whole saga feels like a perfect cautionary tale. It’s a stark reminder of the "drill now, ask questions later" mindset and a visceral example of how much energy we can literally throw away without a second thought. While we’re here talking about heat pumps, optimising solar farms and building better batteries, there’s a hole in the desert that’s been burning away for half a century. Madness!