Confused, how is this useful?
There are many MANY useful applications of carbon neutral methane. The most beneficial and obvious to me are:
- Useful method of storing excess generated solar and wind power
- Entire industries, markets, and infrastructure already existing for the storage, transportation, and consumption of methane
You can get methane out of a cow’s ass all day long
You cannot get pipeline grade methane out of cows ass, and even if you could, you wouldn’t have the technology to capture it for use in the marketplace in any quantity that would be cost effective against fossil fuel based methane. As in, even if you could (and you can’t), it would cost so much that no one would buy it and instead just pull more out of the ground. The solution proposed here is on the path to being worth skipping the fossil fuel route for methane and using this instead.
and methane is a greenhouse gas,
So is the CO2 that is being used as the feedstock to create the methane. This would be reducing atmospheric CO2, which I hope you would agree is a useful element when directly combating climate change from C02 emissions.
I thought we wanted less methane, not more.
This wouldn’t be producing net more methane. The market is already consuming all of methane it demands. This would replace some of the supply that is currently being fulfilled by carbon positive fossil fuel sources.
PuddleOfKittens@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
It’s useful because (besides displacing fossil methane) it’s a stepping-stone to producing methanol, which can be used to produce propane, which has a lower greenhouse coefficient per gram than CO2 (and also displaces fossil methane).
over_clox@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Found Hank Hill
👍