Goal of this article is to present a detailed kinetic scheme able to describe a large variety of macroscopic experimental data related to methane pyrolysis, partial oxidation and combustion. Due to the importance of C2 chemistry, detailed comparisons for pyrolysis and oxidation of ethane, ethylene and acetaldehyde are also reported. The main effort has been put in collecting and unifying these experimental knowledge into a single and comprehensive kinetic scheme. The result of this analysis is to enlarge the simulation capabilities of a single and general kinetic scheme; such a model, expensive in terms of species and reactions (more than 70 real and ‘;equivalent’ species involved in more than 1600 elementary reactions), maintains the typical advantages of mechanistic kinetic models. Therefore, once the submechanisms of the simpler species are validated and tested on the basis of a large set of experimental data, it becomes feasible to analyze the oxidation and decomposition of larger hydrocarbon fuels with only a very limited set of new primary elementary reactions