I'm Owen Pernel. I work as a producer for BBC Arabic in the documentaries team.

Owen has an important beat. He makes TV about the Arabic-speaking world. And so he has a close eye on what is happening in the Middle East.

That means monitoring local news, talking to people, and even keeping a watch of social media.

And it was there, on Twitter, their own spotted images that would burn themselves into his brain.

Just massive, massive flames in southern Iraq that appeared to just come out of the ground.

I'm Maeve McClenigan.

This is the tip-off. Those images of flares from oil fields stuck with Owen, and he wasn't the only one interested in them.

BBC Arabic had been talking to Greenpeace UK, and one reporter at Greenpeace's journalist unit unearthed,

Joe Sandler Clark. He had been thinking about the same things as Owen.

This came up a long time ago, really. I was fascinated by the issue of gas flaring, which is,

if you've seen an oil field on TV or in person, that's the kind of flame that

shoots out of the field. And essentially what that is is gas that's produced by drilling oil

and it's set alight if there's nowhere for it to go. And in places like Iraq where there isn't

the infrastructure to process the gas, a huge amount it's flared.

Joe had found some data on gas flare burn-offs that was collected by the World Bank.

And when he dug into the data, he found that Iraq had the second highest number of flares in the world, second only to Russia.

But what was going on with Iraqi oil these days wasn't much discussed,

and that had piqued Joe's interest.

And then, as luck would have it, BBC Arabic got in touch

around the same time that I started looking at that.

So while Joe got to work on his investigation,

Owen at the BBC kept digging in and reading as much as he could.

...