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Comment on Terraform Industries actually created synthetic methane from sunlight, water, and air

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.

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over_clox@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Interesting. Guess you’ve never heard of a fistulated cow before, they can totally connect tubing or pipes to cows to harvest methane straight out of their intestines.

I’ll leave it to you wonderful people out there to look up what a fistulated cow is. Disclaimer, it’s a bit disturbing.

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- photon_echo@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  
  Guess you’ve never heard of a fistulated cow before, they can totally connect tubing or pipes to cows to harvest methane straight out of their intestines.
  
  And the cost for fistulating each cow? And how much methane will such a cow produce? How contaminated will the methane be? What methods would be required to refine it to pipeline grade? Further, can you feed a cow with the output overproduction of a PV solar panel?
  
  This is what I meant when I said cows wouldn’t be economically viable sources of methane from electricity. If you think cows are they, then I won’t stop you though.
  
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  - over_clox@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Now see, this is the kind of content I like to see, informative and educational banter, with thoughts, opinions, and relevant links 👍
    
    Now, what ever happened to regularly riding horses around? I mean hell, they’re self-fueled lawnmowers that double as transportation…
    
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    photon_echo@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    
    Now, what ever happened to regularly riding horses around?
    
    Besides the issue with horse excrement, other issues occurred (Hayden, 2016): Dead horses often clogged city streets; In New York City in 1880, 15,000 horses died on the streets, or 41 dead horses a day (which had to be removed); Some place to stable the 100,000+ horses that operated within New York, and food to feed them; On a per capita basis, 19th century horse-drawn vehicle accident rates were similar to those of the automobile in the 20th century.
    
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