fiddling whilst rome is burning?

About 5% of the latent energy in a coal seam exists as desorbable methane in interstitial voids and adjoing coal surfaces.

CSG operations extract a significant portion of that gas, and it is very much in their interest to capture most of it and lose as little of it as they can.

Underground coal mining has to capture, vent and/or flare that gas ahead of mine operations for obvious safety reasons and the residual of any desorbable methane would vent to the atmosphere from the mined coal brought to the surface.

Open cut coal mining would simply have all methane vent to the atmosphere as the seam was exposed and worked and as the coal is brought to the surface for stockpiling/transport.

I'd imagine if GSG rather than coal was the dominant fuel driving powergen, potential futitive emmissions of methane would be a fraction of actual methane emmissions associated with coal mining.

Then from the powergen process itself, gas fired produces something like a 30-40% reduction in the other greenhouse gas, CO2.

To me there seems to be misdirected and possibly misinformed effort behind the anti CSG protests on environmental grounds ... a case of fiddling whilst Rome is burning?

Besides greenies and assorted followers, what other interested parties might be behind anti CSG protests using "enviro/socio" issues as the "convenient" argument? What industries/businesses might not appreciate a local or regional gas economy?

Dex