Thanks for the input, I've added the recipe pretty much like you suggested. You can enable it via mod settings and it is also fully customizable with FC.
Usually petroleum gas should not outpace syngas when scaling up science. That is actually one of the reasons I changed the "cracking order" from heavy-oil → light-oil → petroleum-gas ← methane-gas to heavy-oil → light-oil → petroleum-gas → methane-gas in 0.2.0. However, I can imagine that changes depending on the mod constellation.
I've quickly verified that cerys uses "methane" like scrap chemistry does, so technically there was some form compatibility with cerys if you also had scrap chemistry enabled. Thus I've added an option to enable normal methane without scrap chemistry called "force methane compatibility" (requires FC). With that option, BC's recipe will use normal methane but you need to have another mod (like cerys and scrap chemistry) enabled that provides the fluid definition for it.