The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

[LP]

By the way, methane is one of the worst greenhouse gases and it’s pretty audacious to try to sell blue hydrogen on the basis that it produces commercially useful gases like methane. That brings to mind the cigarette industry’s promotion of the health benefits of smoking.

If methane is burnt, carbon dioxide is produced. And I’m guessing the blue hydrogen producers aren’t going to store ad infinitum methane byproducts that are surplus to commercial needs.

Garbage dumps that capture the methane created by decomposition and burn it to produce power are minimising the damage created in disposing of waste. But releasing methane trapped in coal is not in the public interest when hydrogen can be created without creating carbon dioxide and methane.

Your lifestyle doesn't exist without methane, it's a base ingredient of many of the materials and chemicals you use hundreds of times a day, like it or not cars, clothing, building materials, pharmaceuticals, appliances, paint, pretty much every modern material or surface treatment has been touched by methane in the resource or material supply chain.

By the way, methane is fractionally short lived compared to CO2, so while methane is far more reactive, it's gone form the environment in just a fraction of the time that CO2 exists, consumed by organisms as a building block of life, so nature uses it in much the same way humans use it to manufacture and engineer materials.