This may make it easier to bottle up and sell the methane gas as fuel so it can be burned efficiently elsewhere, since transporting gas from remote locations is very hard and expensive, either in pipelines or chilled and liquefied. Still ends up as CO2 in the atmosphere, but that's drastically better than methane, which eventually reacts into CO2 anyway after decades of 10-80x warming.
This is especially true at the many sites that produce very small, but collectively significant, amounts of methane, specifically landfills (check Vespene Energy, a startup in California targeting this problem [0]).
So, this is potentially a fantastic development because it could create a profit incentive to completely capture waste methane rather than at best flaring it (which has been found to only be about 91% efficient in practice [1]) or at worst simply venting it. Right now, the only incentive to even flare methane is general goodwill or fear of the stick of regulation. A carrot to generate money along with the stick of fines would be a much more powerful force to actually reduce the impact, especially in most of the non western world that don't have a very strong stick.
That is something I mentioned in another comment below.
It's still an open question whether conversion to methanol, transportation, and sale will be cheap enough to actually generate a profit. It the real world, it might simply cost too much or be too dirty of a conversion that the numbers don't add up.
In this case, then we will still be better off just burning it efficiently on site.
Synthetic methane has very controllable levels of contaminants. If this can use an abundant catalyst or small enough amounts of rare elements it's a good steptowards powering a lot of existing infrastructure with sunlight.
This is especially true at the many sites that produce very small, but collectively significant, amounts of methane, specifically landfills (check Vespene Energy, a startup in California targeting this problem [0]).
So, this is potentially a fantastic development because it could create a profit incentive to completely capture waste methane rather than at best flaring it (which has been found to only be about 91% efficient in practice [1]) or at worst simply venting it. Right now, the only incentive to even flare methane is general goodwill or fear of the stick of regulation. A carrot to generate money along with the stick of fines would be a much more powerful force to actually reduce the impact, especially in most of the non western world that don't have a very strong stick.
[0] - https://twitter.com/Digital_Ore
[1] - https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/09/oil-industry-flaring...