Sure, but if we could reuse the coal infrastructure as part of a transition away from fossil fuels, why wouldn't we consider that?
Unlike methane, coal is mostly just used for power generation, and there's relatively little infrastructure associated with transporting it. Natural gas is used for furnaces, stoves, dryers, hot water heaters, etc. and there are millions of miles of pipes and associated infrastructure used to transport it directly to peoples' homes.
The complexity and cost for retrofitting hundreds of millions of homes and electrifying all the associated appliances is immense, not to mention all the backlash you get from people who love their gas stoves and grills. If we could just switch to generating renewable methane it would be a huge win in terms of logistical simplicity and would minimize disruption to peoples' day to day lives, which would probably make folks a lot more willing to accept it without putting up a huge fight.
> The complexity and cost for retrofitting hundreds of millions of homes and electrifying all the associated appliances is immense
This is overselling the difficulty. What you're saying is true, but you don't need to rip out functioning appliances. Appliances have a finite service lifetime; once they fail, replace them with electrified appliances. Already here in the year 2023, I wouldn't dream of building a house with a gas stove or gas heating. Induction stoves are just plain better than gas stoves, and heat pumps are cheaper than gas heating once you factor in that the gas-heated house will need a separate AC installation for cooling, whereas the heat-pump house won't. These days, methane doesn't make sense anywhere except at the power generation end, and power generation sources are fungible and can be gradually replaced on their own schedule.
Not really. The reason coal was so popular was because you didn't really need any specialized infrastructure. It is a solid you can just ship using the same trains and trucks you use for TVs and apples. So you're really only giving up the mines and power plants.
This seems to be arguing that the existence of natural gas pipe infrastructure is somehow a benefit of natural gas, rather than a downside. The pipes are an expense, to say nothing of the fact that even our best-maintained pipes are leaking 2% of their gas directly into the atmosphere per year (the worst are leaking double or triple that). A hunk of coal that falls off a truck doesn't contribute to emissions; a leaky methane pipe does, which can actually make natgas plants overall worse for emissions than coal.
Exactly - it is an argument for continuing to use coal, because we have valuable infrastructure even though we know how bad it is for the environment. Which explains why it is so hard to stop using coal.
In the US, the share of power being generated by coal has fallen from 50% in 2005 to 20% in 2022. (In absolute terms, which is what really matters in an emissions context, it's fallen from 2T kwh to 0.75.) To phase out existing infrastructure just takes incentives and time (and 18 years isn't even that much time on the scale of infrastructure investments). The same can happen to methane infrastructure, especially since non-fossil alternatives are far more viable than they were when coal began to be phased out.
And the US has stopped building new coal fired power plants, so a decay to zero is just a matter of time (although it could and should be accelerated.)
Unlike methane, coal is mostly just used for power generation, and there's relatively little infrastructure associated with transporting it. Natural gas is used for furnaces, stoves, dryers, hot water heaters, etc. and there are millions of miles of pipes and associated infrastructure used to transport it directly to peoples' homes.
The complexity and cost for retrofitting hundreds of millions of homes and electrifying all the associated appliances is immense, not to mention all the backlash you get from people who love their gas stoves and grills. If we could just switch to generating renewable methane it would be a huge win in terms of logistical simplicity and would minimize disruption to peoples' day to day lives, which would probably make folks a lot more willing to accept it without putting up a huge fight.