Why do you suppose the petrochemical industry isn’t harvesting the methane bubbling up from permafrost and Northern lakes?

Good question.

Cost and the environmental movement..

Cost: because the capital expense required to build extraction plants and support facilities up there would be humongous. The ROI (return on investment) period would be very long, if ever. Especially as the world is moving away from hydrocarbons/

Environmental movement – even if you could get permission to build facilities in the permafrost (which is itself very, very iffy given the history that the evironmental movement has it stopping sensible development) – there is no chance that envrionmentalists will support the infrastucture, shipping, inevitable spills, and human effect that petrouelm capture development would bring about.

No oil company wants to fight that sort of struggle with so little dollars to return

The bucks aren’t there and the tree huggers would make it impossible.

Capturing the gas in the wild is more expensive than creating it.

It’s sort of randomly bubbling out, sometimes it explodes. It’s also way out in the middle of nowhere. The logistics are just not practical. We don’t really want to burn it either. Methane is a much stronger greenhouse gas but it does not persist very long unlike CO2.

How could it be captured? And what could be done with it economically?

Seems inconvenient.

Landfills create a lot of methane too. Garbage companies collect methane and sell off the energy I think. I don’t fully understand it.

My garbage company supposedly avoids all that methane from releasing into the air by incinerating. Here’s a link https://www.covanta.com/what-we-do/waste-to-energy

Seems they’d have to drill waaaay down in the earth and tap into the source @kritiper.

I’ve asked this question myself.