They recently opened a new massive methane cracker plant in Antwerp. Hope to see it go out of business in my lifetime.
this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2026
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Methane cracking is good for the climate. Instead of burning methane and contribute to global warming, they crack methane to produce hydrogen and solid carbon for materials (construction, electronics and advanced materials). If i had my way, all natural gas would be cracked instead of burned. The less methane extracted the better, but still the best use for methane.
methane cracker? that's a very unusual unit that outputs hydrogen and carbon. i could find info about opening of ethane cracker in 2025, but that's for plastics, next to shutdown of another similar unit
I think you are talking about the ethane cracker of Ineos. Ethane is a byproduct of natural gas refinement while methane is the main component of natural gas.
Surprising fact about renewable energy: It provides electrical energy! That means you don't need as much other sources of electricity compared to not having any renewable energy. Now you know.
Demand may be lower but my production is not going down.
You never produced, you can only recycle.
New greenhouse gases are produced where they produce fertilizer for the foods you eat.
Well no, you can produce methane from other hydrocarbons. You eat stuff and fart out methane
I ate ice cream today, it's gonna become methane tomorrow
Methane becomes CO2 which is absorbed by plants we eat to produce methane again. Recycling.
I mean where do you draw the line between this sort of recycling and just a conservation of matter / energy argument in which just about everything is "recycled" instead of produced?
In terms of atmospheric carbon, it's either newly brought up from underground petroleum, or it's recycled from what's already up here. If you care for volcanoes, you can add them as a third source.
Well that's oversimplifying it quite a bit.
If I eat plants from my own garden, there's no methane used in the fertilizer because I don't use fertilizer. Yet my noxious-ass intestines will produce methane from something that wasn't methane before.
It's the whole reason they wanted to tax cow farts here. Your cows could be eating all natural grass that hasn't been fertilized at all, but they're turning other carbon compounds into methane.
And methane is an order of magnitude worse than CO2 for global warming long term.
Well that’s overcomplicating it quite a bit. Just look at the carbon-based molecules. Lump CO2 and CH4 together. Their ratio can be approximated as a constant over some time so who cares. Part if is from newly extracted fossil material, part of the lot is recycled. That's it.
Their ratio can be approximated as a constant over some time so who cares
The people on a burning planet probably?
You don't need ANY fossils to be dug up to produce methane, or CO2 for that matter. Of course it helps.
I have no idea who you're arguing with or what's your point. But have a nice day.
This will continue as long as there are CCGTs used as baseload, then it will drop as CCGTs (and biomass + waste burners) will cover the gaps