Near me, there's a old waste tip, landscaped over but with an installation that seems to be there to collect and burn off the resulting methane seep (otherwise held from escaping by an impermeable below the topping?), and it seems to be running continuously doing
something audible with the gases ultimately escaping up its chimney. I don't know how much energy balance there is (is it self-sustaining, except for the offsite power needed to boot it up again should it falter and momentarily extinguish?) but it's obviously there to make sure that methane leaks are denatured down to 'mere' carbon dioxide. At a level below an actual biogas power-station or even CHP complex.
Maybe it
does, these days, have enough oomph to supply back into the national grid (assuming it doesn't already, but I'm not convinced). It might compete easily with household rooftop PV panels, trickle-supplying a decent or even complete proportion of the unit.
Fractionally (inversely-)distilling ordinary atmosphere for its methane might be a bit ambitious given the content and extractability of methane, but imagine instead a tip-top installation. Perhaps its power needs could be augmented by the additional planting of an array of panels, allowing a decent land-use other than pure wildlife-haven/dogwalking-circuit for the community. And a tuned quantity of burning could power (perhaps via seebeck-effect energy scraping, no matter what miniature turbines operated before the exhaust) the difference in power-needs of the process and what is readily farmed or accepted as feed-in from the mains grid.
So, cryogenically piping off quantities of methane fuel, heat exchanging the liquid product again against the ground-temperature seep-feed, gives a supply useful for burning somewhere
other than here (e.g. mixed into the mains-gas network or provided for use in LPG vehicles). Or it could be sent on to further chemical processing and synthesis into more sequesterable forms that
don't result in its being burnt, at all, but perhaps converted into consumer products sufficiently likely to not be arbitrarily polluting in their own futures.
In short, I think it's unlikely the 1 part in 60ish thousand of normal air (by volume) that is methane is economically extractable except
maybe as an incidental by-catch alongside other monetisable components (would a million-hectare solar field in the Sahara desert powering various dripping taps of atmospheric components¹ be economic enough given the maintenance issues?), but it might become feasible if specifically targeting 'man-made' sources of the stuff that are already being deliberately funnelled for less ambitious reasons.
G8 idea m8.
Please close the g8 on the way out, then!
(Actually, as well as the typo, I think you're probably being deliberately asa9, as am I.)
¹ Derived from an inverted-chimney sucking in air from high up, perhaps primarily for water condensation to be concentrated and used to irrigate some of the part-shaded fringes of the array as an overall benefit to the region. Numbers could be run on this, I'm sure.
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Topic: AmeriPol thread (Read 3608537 times)