You missed one of the most important parts about methane as well: The Sabatier Reaction [1] Hydrogen + CO2 => Methane + Water This is an extremely important r

You missed one of the most important parts about methane as well: The Sabatier Reaction [1] Hydrogen + CO2 => Methane + Water This is an extremely important reaction. Mars, for instance, has effectively unlimited Hydrogen and CO2 which also means effectively unlimited Methane and Water. How just absurdly convenient is that? But it also plays a major role in things like life support. We breathe out CO2. On Earth where we have an enormous atmosphere this doesn't matter. But in closed systems, such as the ISS or what will be the habitation regions on Mars, this is a major issue that needs to be dealt with or we'd kill ourselves with our own exhaust. NASA, on the ISS, used to deal with life support by producing oxygen from imported water, and discarding the produced hydrogen. They'd then collect exhaled CO2 from the air using CO2 scrubbers and also discard that. That was a pretty inefficient system that required large amounts of imported water to sustain. Now they use the Sabatier Reaction to convert the exhaled CO2 into water and methane. Only the methane is discarded. And as a result of this, instead of needing to import large amounts of water, now all they need to import is a small amount of hydrogen to keep the reaction running. On Mars this will result in a really cool system. What will be an increasingly large scale life support system will be literally creating rocket fuel as a byproduct. Of course methane is also a controlled and efficient gas, so it can also be safely used for things like cooking dinner. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction