I thought that we need to do both - stop emitting and clean up historic emissions - to keep climate change in check. Zero emissions won't happen for a very long time, unless everyone is ok with giving up air travel and a few other modern conveniences. Is carbon capture really pointless?

>Why are there so many methane flares at oil wells in Texas, then?

Flaring is more cost effective at current prices

Yeah, my understanding is that there's a couple of moving parts for that:

- Methane is 28x more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 is. I'm rusty on my chemistry but it seems like CH4 + 2 O2 => CO2 + 2 H2O, so by flaring it you're getting a 28x reduction in GHG potential even though it looks bad seeing it burning like that.

- The infrastructure isn't in place to harvest, liquify, and transport methane from oil fields. Oil itself is relatively easy to transport away from oil fields to refineries, while natural gas needs near-site processing to turn it into a liquid and keep it compressed. You also would need to build out (smaller) pipelines to transport it from the oil field to the existing natural gas handling infrastructure which may not be nearby.

It's one of those things where it's basically free coming out of the well but a big investment would be required to capture it and, assuming you're going to be pulling the oil out anyway, burning it is better for the environment than just venting it.

Edit: I do recall recently reading about some tech though where they were going to start using it on-site for fuel for equipment. I think it was for on-site generators instead of using electricity from the grid, but I don't have a link handy.

That would be Giga Energy.[1] They co-locate containerized Bitcoin mining systems with wells that produce excess natural gas and methane, burn the gas for power, and export bitcoin. Really.

[1] https://www.gigaenergy.com/

There is one like that which runs compute (read Nvidia cards).

That would kinda suck as a user as these things are notorious for switching on and off as gas is available (which isn't constant). For bitcoin miners that doesn't matter, but if I was running a long compute job...

Yeah, I have no special insight, I just thought it was interesting. Remembered the name now, Crusoe:

https://www.crusoe.ai/blog/turning-waste-into-power-crusoes-...

How are they planning to produce methane for return flights from Mars? There is Copper on Mars.

"Copper nanoclusters: Selective CO2 to methane conversion beyond 1 A/cm²" (2024) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092633732...

Methane is a fossil fuel replacement. A good fraction of Moscow's bus fleet run on methane. In general, ICEs run just fine on natural gas as gasoline replacement.

Can it be used in liquid form somehow?

Most Indian taxis have boots occupied by compressed natural gas tanks, many fitted from factory.

What is known as "natural gas" is chemically mostly methane if that helps with answering your question.

From what I know it is just cheaper to flare natural gas that occurs as byproduct of oil production than to deal with it otherwise.

Methane is also known as "natural gas," the thing which burns in your range stovetop or powers your water heater. When liquified it is known as Liquid Natural Gas or LNG. You may have heard of that.

In general, starting from methane you can then work your way up to all sorts of various hydrocarbons like gasoline or jet fuel.

Methane is also the propellant of SpaceX's Starship. If they launch as frequently as they want to launch, Elon will likely invest in local zero-carbon production of methane using techniques like the OP.