Genuine question, if methane is a more potent greenhouse gas, wouldn’t just burning it be the lesser of two evils anyway, and far easier to accomplish?
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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That releases it into the atmosphere: https://gml.noaa.gov/education/info_activities/pdfs/CTA_the_methane_cycle.pdf
Burning stuff and releasing it into the atmosphere is part of the problem, we need to reduce that in general.
Oh I totally agree about reduction, just that capture and storage is a massive undertaking compared to venting and combustion.
It needs to be done, even though it is a hard problem to solve. :) It's not something that you can really do a workaround for. The problem is there is too much in the atmosphere, burning it only compounds the problems.
I feel that given the fact that it has economic value (can be burned as fuel), major point sources of it should just capture it and use or package it for fuel. Or, better yet, chemical precursors for more durable goods.
Hmm… I’m a little unconvinced by that though because natural sources for gathering methane are so much more efficient than trying to capture it as a result of, say, fracking or farming.
I get it’s a useful fuel, but it’s also cheap and abundant. CO2 capture is easier than CH4 capture, per the article, so combusting difficult to capture methane at the source into easier to deal with CO2 seems like a no brainer.
But also I’m a biologist not a climate scientist so 🤷♂️
I was thinking about point sources, like industrial processes that would normally outgas methane. On the other hand, flaring methane from natural and/or non-point sources is pretty much impossible (natural "will-o-wisps" notwithstanding).
I would guess that, at least theoretically, there's some level of concentration of methane below which it'd be better to use air-conversion to CO2 via zeolites vs. point-source capture.
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