Wasting Methane is Stupid

Hi there,

Welcome to the 21st edition of our newsletter, The Overview: A biweekly dispatch on the world of methane and other super pollutants.

Unlike carbon dioxide, methane carries inherent value. It’s not just a climate liability but an economic asset waiting to be tapped. As awareness grows about methane’s outsized role in global warming, so too does recognition of its potential as a source of energy, revenue, and opportunities for innovation. What was once considered predominantly an environmental externality is increasingly being seen for what it also is: value wafting off into the atmosphere.

In this edition, we’ll zoom in on how new frameworks and language, particularly terms like “waste to value” rather than just “methane mitigation”, can help to crystallize this story and catalyze capital allocation for this space. These shifts aren’t just rhetorical; they’re opening doors to new investment in a historically capital-starved sector, changing how the private sector engages with methane, and broadening the market for meaningful methane work.

Mitigating methane has always been one of the fastest, most cost-effective ways to slow global warming. Now, we’re also seeing that capturing and utilizing methane on Earth can be a win for businesses, supply chains, national economies, and many other stakeholders. “Waste to value” approaches recognize that methane isn’t just something we should avoid emitting, it’s something we can make great use of.

The top line

Almost a third of the way through 2025 (yes, already!), global methane emissions remain stubbornly high, still hovering around record atmospheric levels since the Industrial Revolution. Collectively, we’re falling short of rebalancing the methane equation. Human-caused emissions, compounded by natural sources (which warming may also accelerate), continue to exceed the planet’s ability to cycle methane out of the atmosphere or otherwise.

But there’s a silver lining: namely, growing recognition that our methane problem is also an economic opportunity. The same molecules warming the planet can also power homes, fuel industries, create cleaner chemicals, and even ameliorate geopolitical tensions. That’s the shift we’re watching, the shift from framing methane strictly as a problem toward seeing it as a resource we’ve been squandering.

This reframe is starting to show up not only in thought leadership (like Mindy Lubber’s recent Forbes piece on methane reduction as a business win for food companies), but in the language and categories used across the private sector. “Waste to value” is more than a buzzword - it’s a lens for appreciating how methane reduction can drive returns and resilience at the same time.

Let’s look at one perspective on where methane emissions stem from today:

Within all of these sectors, there are opportunities to reduce waste and create value. In fact, waste to value businesses and opportunities are ones we’ve written about a lot in these pages (and, with respect to the companies, they're often they're are often ones Overview Capital is an investor in). For example, see past editions here, here, and here; we specifically included “Waste-to-value businesses: A durable approach, no matter what” as a specific “area to watch” in our 2025 Methane Outlook. 

Let’s break down opportunities empowering us to keep methane on earth and out of the atmosphere across measurement, agriculture, oil and gas, and beyond.

1) Methane measurement: the foundation of waste to value

As we've covered in recent editions (here, here, here), methane detection and monitoring tech is evolving fast, thanks to satellites, drones, LiDAR, and other tools, we're now identifying emissions more accurately, affordably, and at greater scale than ever before.

You don’t need to be fluent in remote sensing to appreciate this: falling costs and rising precision are helping uncover high-value emissions sources that were previously overlooked. That’s key for “waste to value” models. The clearer and more persistent a methane leak is, the greater the opportunity to step in and turn that waste into economic return.

This improved visibility underpins many of the opportunities we’ll explore below, in sectors where methane has historically been treated as a liability, it is now being repositioned as a potential asset. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of companies making better methane identification, monitoring, and measurement possible: 

Agriculture: turning burps into business models

Spark Climate Solution’s recent annual report underscores a hard truth: agriculture, especially livestock, is a significant emissions source, typically pinned as the #1 or #2 largest driver of anthropogenic methane next to the oil & gas industry.

There are two main ways cows make methane: their burps and their waste. 

Let’s tackle the first one, the burps. Cows make methane as a function of their natural digestive process, and utilizing that methane for something economically productive is not viable. Even with cattle kept indoors where gas ventilation is generally required and there is a concentration of more animals in one space, the methane is so low-concentration that flaring or catalyzing is often the best option for this source, with very no revenue potential aside from carbon offsets for avoided emissions. 

The second, waste, can be more straightforward. When manure itself is stored in anaerobic conditions (such as in lagoons or covered digesters), it can produce a more concentrated methane stream for methane capture. New technologies are making this process better, cheaper, faster, and more efficient (see here, here, and here, for instance).

The other way to utilize methane in animal agriculture is to prevent its emissions via biological interventions, such as feed additives, selective breeding, or vaccines. How? They work to decrease methane production and a progressing stream of studies show there’s potential to improve animal efficiencies and increase meat/milk production by virtue of doing so, whether by decreasing DMI (dry matter intake) or increasing the rate of calorie to meat and milk production (the twain are really one and the same). 

There’s innovation beyond livestock, too. Windfall Bio, for example, uses microbes to convert methane into useful products for agriculture and offers a solid case study. As described by CEO, Josh Silverman, in a podcast Nick hosted:

Beyond that? Composting, which we won’t get into in depth, is a great way to turn wasted food into valuable fertilizer; New York is reaping the benefits of its revamped composting program much faster than expected, though composting itself and policy surrounding it is nuanced.

Again, here’s a non-exhaustive list of companies working in these spaces:

Oil & Gas: from waste to opportunity

Nowhere is methane’s value more obvious than in oil and gas. Methane is the product. Yet, despite that, the U.S. oil and gas industry emits roughly 16 million metric tons of methane each year through flaring, venting, and leaks. That’s around $2 billion worth of wasted gas. 

Why? Historically, the O&G industry’s emissions have been based on estimations, not actuals, and the tech to detect and manage emissions has been limited. But that’s changing. Companies like Xplorobot and Highwood Emissions Management (Overview portfolio companies) are rolling out full-stack leak detection and monitoring platforms. Combined with stronger measurement tools, this sets the stage for more proactive mitigation.

Our current administration, however, is not making it easy. For example, see the recent overturning of the enforcement of the Waste Emissions Fee. As we recently covered: 

Our hope is that better monitoring will drive a real understanding of lost methane, the lost revenue it represents, and that, coupled with global methane intensity import standards, O&G companies will still proactively reduce emissions in all policy environments.

Upstream emissions remain a harder leak to fix. According to BloombergNEF, venting and flaring accounted for 64% and 11% of methane emissions from oil and gas in 2021, representing three-quarters of all methane emissions from the sector. Fixing that isn’t just about tightening pipes. It requires infrastructure to capture and use gas at sites originally built for oil extraction.

Still, innovators are stepping in. Crusoe repurposes flared gas to power data centers, and in 2023 alone, prevented 8,500 metric tons of methane emissions while generating over 635,000 MWh of electricity. Emvolon, another Overview Capital company, builds modular systems that convert otherwise stranded methane into liquid fuels like methanol and ammonia.

Even with significant geopolitical blind spots, like Turkmenistan and Russia, where methane oversight is minimal, the sector remains one of the most promising for waste to value transition. As per research published by Illissa Ocko (and eight other researchers and scientists) in 2021, a full 50% of methane emissions across the global oil and gas sector are both technically addressable and economically feasible today.

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of companies working in these spaces:

Other sources: landfills, wastewater, and the limits of capture

Beyond agriculture and energy, there are other methane-rich sources: landfills, wastewater, rice farms, and coal mining, among them. While landfills, wastewater treatment plants, and even rice farming have economically viable and commercializing technologies and businesses making use of otherwise wasted methane, significant sources like coal mines present more diffuse, lower-concentration emissions, complicating the economics of capture. 

Coal mines aren’t built with gas infrastructure, and emissions tend to be too distributed to make recovery attractive. Additionally, coal mines do not stop leaking methane when out of operation, the same way oil wells continue to leak methane even when no longer operational. There’s typically little to no economic incentive to capture those methane plumes, and with Trump’s excitement around pausing or freezing the $4.7B of federal funds allocated for abandoned oil well plugging and cleanup, leaves us in limbo.

Natural sources, like wetlands and thawing permafrost, pose even bigger threats and hurdles: they’re remote, unpredictable, and largely beyond reach for capture technology.

Here, the strategy shifts. Step one is slowing human-driven warming to prevent amplifying these natural emissions. Step two is considering technology, like atmospheric methane removal, that mimics the natural breakdown of methane in the air, accelerating its conversion to CO₂. But remember, this space is not ready for technological investment. We’re still very much at the academic stage here, which we’ve covered in the past.

Considering we’ve offered many examples and case studies at this stage, and that one of our most recent newsletters covered waste to value opportunities in the landfill sector in depth, we’ll leave this here for now, however. We trust you get the gist, and that if you’re hungry for more, we’ve linked plenty more reading for you to digest.

If you’re reading this newsletter, you likely already appreciate the climate case for cutting methane emissions. You may well also understand the economic case. But making that case more compelling to the U.S. federal administration, let alone the broader world, remains the real challenge. While the U.S. is in the top five of the largest national emitters of methane emissions globally (the exact ranking varies across sources and changes over time), between the four of five other top emitters (China, India, Russia, and Brazil), the other four emit more methane emissions cumulatively than the U.S. does alone. The U.S. could have taken a federal policy leadership position on methane mitigation, but that’s changed for now. 

Remember, it’s a big world, and what the U.S. alone does won’t alone (nor could have ever) balance(d) the methane budget. However, first-movers are often important in catalyzing change, as Tesla did for EVs. There is still opportunity for leadership in mitigation technology, building economical waste to value models, and creating state and even municipal legislation to support methane emission reduction.

Boiled down, it’s all quite simple. Methane is valuable when utilized on Earth for energy. When it escapes into the atmosphere, it poses an unparalleled cost on society and the planet.

While we think this is quite binary and easy to understand, we can’t assume “methane mitigation” speaks for itself. To build momentum and markets, we need language that makes the opportunity feel immediate, exciting, and investable. “Waste to value” is one powerful frame. Let’s keep testing others.

To drive this home: Methane on Earth is valuable. Methane in the atmosphere is a cost: environmental, economic, and human. Being that it’s Earth Week, we’ll get a bit romantic by saying that methane mitigation work is one of the biggest (we think biggest) opportunities available to us as humans today. We believe that the future belongs to those who can flip the script and build the systems to make that value real.

Open call for input:

1. Beyond “waste to value” how and where else are you seeing methane mitigation work and its benefits being described in new, salient, resonant ways?

2. What words, terms, or trends would you be curious to see tested more in the market to see whether they can catalyze more interest and investment in methane mitigation?

3. What’s your wildest idea for a comprehensive “methane mitigation” rebrand?

At the most basic level, as you read in these pages, we like reframing conversations around words like “value,” “opportunity,” and even “agency.” That said, we’re sure many of you have great ideas. Reply to this newsletter and we’ll include some select responses in a future edition.

Maybe we’ll even host a webinar to discuss and ideate collectively, could be fun.

Other news & reading

• Worth a skim: While referenced in this newsletter, we wanted to call out again that Spark Climate’s Annual Report is out. The Spark team is fantastic, and their work is always worth a read.

• Selective breeding spending spree: The Bezos Earth Fund and the Global Methane Hub launched a $27 million initiative to fund research into selectively breeding for livestock to reduce the rate at which they produce methane. We wrote more about selective breeding in this past edition for those of you who are curious to learn more.

• Tell me some good news: There are umpteen types of feed additives being researched, developed, tested, and commercialized to reduce methane emissions from livestock and boost feed conversion efficiencies to solidify the economic case. University of Florida researchers might have another concoction to add to the list.

Thanks for reading the 21st edition of The Overview. If you haven’t already, subscribe to The Overview and forward this to a colleague or friend who might benefit from it.

— This newsletter is brought to you by Lauren Singer and Nick van Osdol