During burn-offs, oil rigs and refineries send 100 billion cubic meters of methane into the atmosphere each year. But chemists may be able to convert the greenhouse gas into petrochemicals to make plastics. Chemists at Munich University of Technology have developed a simple technique that mixes methane with hydrogen chloride and oxygen. The technique could be used at remote nat-gas reserves that have no infrastructure to transfer the gas to markets to be reused.
