I keep getting ads saying things like “landfills produce more methane pollutants than 56000 cars” or “tell Congress to fix this one methane leak.” I also hear people bring up farming cows as a counter-arguement for any climate action (but not as a “let’s fix this” type arguement sadly). So my thinking is why aren’t people trying to harvest methane and use it for something? Is it inefficient? Are they stupid?
Because methane is a byproduct of the petroleum industry, it’s very cheap. They have so much gas, they torch of a whole lot of it all the time. Which is a good thing, because releasing it as CO2 is actually better than releasing it as methane, obviously releasing it at all is a really bad thing.
It being so cheap makes it really hard for alternative sources to be viable, since it would be more complex and thus more expensive. It is done, but mostly because of regulation, subsidies and as an environmental measure.
Methane does break down fairly fast (still takes years), we keep releasing so much of it, it does contribute a lot to climate change. We are adding more than gets broken down. And even after it breaks down, it’s still contributing to the amount of CO2, so better but not good.
90 years is quite a long time.