I believe the hype, but more as hype than actual good ideas. The EU will likely spend a lot of money to at least get started.
I would be very surprised if at some point there isn't a change to switch to methane instead.
1. Existing distribution network for natural gas can instead distribute pure synthetic methane as natural gas is 96-99% methane.
2. Vehicles can be adapted to CNG without complete redesign. A 5k retrofit might be attractive vs scrapping a whole car.
3. It would be possible with some work to retrofit airplanes to burn LNG. You might have to lose some of say the baggage area for LNG tanks and insulation but once the engines are running the fact that the chilled LNG is boiling away is A-OK since you want to feed it into your engines anyhow.
4. A lot of existing peaker power plants already burn natural gas, no reason they couldn't burn methane too. The round-trip efficiency might not be great these plants already exist. It might be possible to repurpose them to run perhaps only a few dozen hours per month when the wind and solar in your local region happen to both be low output.
Yeah the existing infrastructure is the biggie. In the US anyway, we already have a backbone of natural gas pipelines that go to most areas of the country.
And CNG is already being used on busses, trash trucks, and tractor trailers every day. I had a CNH civic that was a great little car, and basically identical to the gasoline version except for range. Honda stopped making them due to lack of demand. Bummer.
I would be very surprised if at some point there isn't a change to switch to methane instead.
1. Existing distribution network for natural gas can instead distribute pure synthetic methane as natural gas is 96-99% methane.
2. Vehicles can be adapted to CNG without complete redesign. A 5k retrofit might be attractive vs scrapping a whole car.
3. It would be possible with some work to retrofit airplanes to burn LNG. You might have to lose some of say the baggage area for LNG tanks and insulation but once the engines are running the fact that the chilled LNG is boiling away is A-OK since you want to feed it into your engines anyhow.
4. A lot of existing peaker power plants already burn natural gas, no reason they couldn't burn methane too. The round-trip efficiency might not be great these plants already exist. It might be possible to repurpose them to run perhaps only a few dozen hours per month when the wind and solar in your local region happen to both be low output.