I ran across this story the other day, and it could represent a new way of dealing with climate change. Basically, the idea is that if we focus on methane extraction, we could buy enough time that it would allow for additional measures to be put into place.
“Methane removal would buy us considerable time to address the [larger] problem of carbon dioxide emissions,” says Rob Jackson, a professor of earth system science at Stanford and lead author of the paper.
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But while it would likely be necessary to remove hundreds of billions of metric tons of carbon dioxide to return to preindustrial levels, you’d only need to eliminate 3.2 billion tons of methane to get back to earlier levels of that gas.
Doing so would reverse one-sixth of the total warming effect of all greenhouses gases in the atmosphere, the study found.
Crucially, this all assumes that the methane would be converted into carbon dioxide and released again, by heating the trapped molecules. In other words, merely turning one greenhouse gas into another one would still provide very significant reductions in warming. The captured methane could be stored and converted into other products as well, but that would add a lot of cost and complexity to the process.
While this would not be a complete solution, it could potentially buy us several decades to deal with carbon dioxide emissions and extract from the atmosphere. And it would even allow us to use the methane as fuel, and still reduce the effects from greenhouse gases, as shown in the bolded text.
Now, there are some major caveats with this. First, it is still hypothetical and would need to be tested, and second, the techniques for extracting methane are complicated and would need some major research. Still, if this does prove feasible, it also has some potential advantages. Extraction would be much less substantial than the amount of effort needed for the same effects drawing down just with CO2. And if the energy companies could then generate electricity from it then they would be more willing to buy in to the idea. If the techniques prove to be effective, it could even be used to prevent leaks at drilling sites. Better to prevent the leak into the atmosphere then to have to capture it later. Mostly, though, if it would give us more time before catastrophe, and then the millenials and beyond would have control over the government and still have enough time to enact some longer term policies.