You beat me to it, because I was going to say the same thing; wouldn't it only be carbon neutral if you had some means of guaranteeing that there's no leaks? It seems like converting CO2 to methane could actually make things worse...
Isn't problem making new CO₂ from burning fossil fuels, not converting existing Co2 into other things?
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/plant-science/articles/...
Well we're super fucked then because I've read that all the freaking / coal seam gas infra leaks million of tons of methane every year.
How much CO2 is Terraform Industries pulling from the atmosphere to create that 4% of methane that might be leaking?
By CO2 equivalence in the context of greenhouse gas potential [1]. And, the 30X factor is only valid if you look over scales of atmospheric persistence of 100yrs. If you look at scales of 10years (the amount of time methane persists, the GHG potential strength a over 80X.
Liquid (Cryogenic) natural gas tankers and storage emit "boiloff" gas. Some of this can be burned in the 'dual fuel' propulsion engines when combined with a small amount of diesel "pilot" fuel, but not all and I'm uncertain at what quantity. Even engines that burn NG gave methane "leak by" that escapes into the atmosphere. It's not great, and no, nobody is enforcing containment via satellites at the LNG shipping level (despite a comment to the company trary above).
Hydrogen production is a much better option for dense energy storage option.
1.) https://climatechangeconnection.org/emissions/co2-equivalent...
Leaks would happen to a small degree, but since a leak represents money drifting away there's a strong incentive to fix them. Methane leaks of any size are fairly easy to detect. There's been an effort to put up satellites for this purpose.
If using this technology helps us to phase out fossil fuels, it would be a huge net win. This could effectively let us repurpose all our existing natural gas storage, transport, and generation infrastructure into a battery to store surplus renewable or off-peak nuclear energy.
This could also allow renewable energy to be shipped as LNG, allowing the gigantic amounts of solar power in places like the Sahara to be harnessed and exported. The only other way to do this is extremely long distance superconducting or incredibly high voltage transmission lines that would probably be more expensive and very vulnerable.
This is true of existing natural gas infrastructure, and yet...
Let some cheap gas in the atmosphere or invest in costly detection systems and qualified workforce ?
I thought it was a pipe dream but has got some fairly big backers now and does seem to be moving along.
Should've just stopped here. Being synthetically produced doesn't magically make it not a potent greenhouse gas.