Capturing CO2 With Copper, Scientists Generate 'Green Methane' (phys.org) 55
Longtime Slashdot reader Baron_Yam shares a report from Phys.Org, with the caption: "It's not sequestration, but it is a closed carbon loop and can store energy from renewable sources to be released when they are not collecting energy." From the report: Carbon in the atmosphere is a major driver of climate change. Now researchers from McGill University have designed a new catalyst for converting carbon dioxide (CO2) into methane -- a cleaner source of energy -- using tiny bits of copper called nanoclusters. While the traditional method of producing methane from fossil fuels introduces more CO2 into the atmosphere, the new process, electrocatalysis, does not. "On sunny days you can use solar power, or when it's a windy day you can use that wind to produce renewable electricity, but as soon as you produce that electricity you need to use it," says Mahdi Salehi, Ph.D. candidate at the Electrocatalysis Lab at McGill University. "But in our case, we can use that renewable but intermittent electricity to store the energy in chemicals like methane."
By using copper nanoclusters, says Salehi, carbon dioxide from the atmosphere can be transformed into methane and once the methane is used, any carbon dioxide released can be captured and "recycled" back into methane. This would create a closed "carbon loop" that does not emit new carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The research, published recently in the journal Applied Catalysis B: Environment and Energy, was enabled by the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan (USask). The team plans to continue refining their catalyst to make it more efficient and investigate its large-scale, industrial applications. Their hope is that their findings will open new avenues for producing clean, sustainable energy.
By using copper nanoclusters, says Salehi, carbon dioxide from the atmosphere can be transformed into methane and once the methane is used, any carbon dioxide released can be captured and "recycled" back into methane. This would create a closed "carbon loop" that does not emit new carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The research, published recently in the journal Applied Catalysis B: Environment and Energy, was enabled by the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan (USask). The team plans to continue refining their catalyst to make it more efficient and investigate its large-scale, industrial applications. Their hope is that their findings will open new avenues for producing clean, sustainable energy.
Great idea! (Score:4, Insightful)
Turn CO2 into an even more powerful greenhouse gas! Why didn't _I_ think of that?
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Probably because the only application you could think of was to release it all back into the atmosphere rather than... well literally every other application. Hint: It doesn't stay a more potent greenhouse gas after combustion, and we humans so love setting things on fire to the point where our very society depends on it.
Re: Great idea! (Score:2)
True, but it doesn't take a lot of leaks to make it net bad in the short term. Methane leakage is a widespread problem.
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Methane leakage from this generation mechanism is not a widespread problem. For all we know, methane generated by this mechanism doesn't exist long enough for leakage to even be a concern.
Re: Great idea! (Score:2)
from this generation mechanism
I don't think the environment cares how the methane got there. Once in the atmosphere, its effects are the same.
Sources are important from the point of view of collecting/sequestering a particular emission. If this technology is efficient at collecting CO2 at low concentrations, the methane produced can be pumped back into the current distribution system, offsetting the gas pumped from the ground (a leaky process).
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I don't think the environment cares how the methane got there.
You are correct, which is why we should address methane leaks, i.e. where they actually leak rather than some ignorant fearmongering about some other technology.
Methane overwhelmingly leaks from installations that are not dedicated to methane production, transportation or consumption. They are the sources that need to be addressed.
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True, but it doesn't take a lot of leaks to make it net bad in the short term. Methane leakage is a widespread problem.
No. Methane released from production installations not dedicated to gas (e.g. oil wells), and methane released from inadvertent other industries (e.g. garbage disposal and agriculture) is a widespread problem. Methane leaking from gas installations dedicated to methane production, methane transportation, and methane consumption is a tiny insignificant contributor to global warming compared to CO2 released by setting it on fire.
Here's a simple question for you: If you have an installation dedicated to captur
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Cows did. Moo!
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...for storage and then combustion, turning it back into CO2 and H2O.
You end up with the exact same greenhouse gas you started with, only you used it for a while to store energy.
Re:Great idea! (Score:4, Interesting)
You end up with the exact same greenhouse gas you started with, only you used it for a while to store energy.
Hmm, my sarcasm detector picked up a hint of sarcasm. False positive perhaps?
Right, this doesn't lower CO2, kind of like a battery. Or pumped hydro storage. They also allow us to store energy for a while only to end up with the exact same greenhouse gas we started with. The lower CO2 comes from maximizing the utility of lower CO2 energy sources, sources that are often intermittent while demand is more constant. To get the two to play nice we need storage in the middle somewhere.
I see as an additional benefit is that while the "green methane" is stored we've temporarily removed some CO2 from the air. We also have a fuel that we can introduce into our existing natural gas distribution systems so people have fuel for heating and cooking without a need for replacing everyone's appliances with electric versions, meaning we aren't tossing out a lot of old but still functional equipment. Then there's the benefit that we can produce the methane where energy is abundant, such as USA and Canada, and put it on ships to where energy is not abundant, like Europe. Which brings to mind that ships need fuel to move, and ships are moving to natural gas as it's always cleaner and often cheaper than fuel oil, but with green methane they'd be cleaner yet. Battery powered ships haven't proved practical for moving long distance, mostly used for passenger ferries across a bay or whatever, and people are still working out the logistics on building nuclear powered civilian ships.
I remember a TED Talk where T. Boone Pickens explained how natural gas could be a lower CO2 alternative (not "low" exactly, just lower) to liquid petroleum fuels as we work on something better. Well, currently there's an abundance of natural gas in North America but that's not going to last forever. We can transition much of our transportation to natural gas (and natural gas electric hybrids) knowing this technology is promising to replace fossil fuels. If it works then we have an existing natural gas distribution system to move this green methane, a system largely parallel to our electrical grid so each is backing up the other in case of some disruption from natural disaster or something. If this technology doesn't work out then at least we got more value out of our sunk costs in the natural gas network, bought ourselves time in lowered CO2 emissions to find alternatives, etc.
I can keep going on how this technology helps us. I didn't even touch on the non-fuel applications of this technology.
I'm seeing a general hate for any internal combustion engine, though not necessarily in the parent post, when that isn't the bogeyman here. The problem is the fuel. The problem is CO2. The problem is sulfur and other contaminants in petroleum working it's way into our air that would not be there if we used synthesized hydrocarbons instead. Sure, we have some issues with NOx and soot from burning any carbon based fuels but with catalytic converters and other emission control systems that's a relative non-issue. There's NOx and soot in the air from forest fires and bio-mass fuels, nature knows how to deal with that.
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There is nothing "out there" that can lower CO2, at best you get to pump a ton more CO2 into the system to turn a little CO2 back into energy, there are some famous physics laws that will interfere with any plan to create a perpetuum mobile or to create/destroy energy.
CO2 can be captured at best, ideally by plants, plants grow big to consume even more CO2 the more there is around. So if you want to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere, stop putting energy into it and plant some trees near newly built nuclear plants
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Not necessarily, trees live on the order of hundreds or thousands of years even, so by the time you release the CO2, whatever issues are going on today will have passed.
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I've got a strong suspicion that there will turn out to be "frictional losses" that cause this energy storage method to be less efficient than pulling a railroad car full of rocks uphill.
ISTM that either they're working with pure CO2 to get the results or they're going to need to filter the methane away from the contaminants before they can use it.
Re: Great idea! (Score:2)
Power plant burns methane, generates CO2 -> CO2 runs through catalyst -> Methane created. Repeat loop indefinitely.
The catalytic converter on a car works similarly, but with different chemicals involved.
Re: Great idea! (Score:2)
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This is easy (Score:4, Informative)
This is not easy (Score:3)
It wouldn't be "green" without copper (Score:5, Funny)
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Yeah, but it's not as good for scale up due to the oxygen catalyst deactivation and depriving the reaction of oxygen increases hydrogen production which, I mean if that's what you're going for then good deal, but that's not what most are going for. They are after hydrocarbon production. TiO2 catalyst is still wildly unpredictable at scale on your byproducts and having to handle wildly varying production means complex processes to separate the products into usable fuels.
It's not a technical challenge for s
Holy cow! (Score:2)
No seriously. They could have just used a holy cow .. or a regular cow.
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Insert "you are all cows" troll here.
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Insert "you are all cows" troll here.
What ever happened to moocow man? I miss him. Just fun goofiness.
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We used to have great trolls around here .. sad they've all disappeared. I guess slashdot's management cracked down on them? That's really too bad, because they were pretty hilarious/entertaining. I regret not screenshotting some of the more epic ones.
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Changes to the AC system chased away most of them.
We already have a closed loop for CO2 (Score:3)
It's solar powered and requires no human industry to maintain and the reaction product isn't an even worse greenhouse gas like methane, it's oxygen and sugars.
it's called plants.
Photosynthesis is surprisingly inefficient (Score:3)
especially the carbon dioxide capture part (rubisco). Total energy efficiency from sunlight to harvested sugars, starch or cellulose is well below one percent.
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Given the vast tracks of forest across the country (covering roughly 56%), even with inefficiency it still far outstrips any human industrial attempts. And instead of producing methane, it produces lumber which actually does sequester the carbon.
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It's solar powered and requires no human industry to maintain and the reaction product isn't an even worse greenhouse gas like methane, it's oxygen and sugars.
it's called plants.
How much land does that take? Or freshwater? Labor costs? Fertilizers? Don't we need all those things for food?
We should not be burning food. Civilizations have ended because they thought burning food for fuel was a good idea.
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The amount of land we use for human edible food is absolutely minuscule, most of the land we could use will only grow things that animals can eat. The best thing to convert plants into food at scale are beef and goat.
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It's pretty major, pure fertilized cropland is around a fifth in the US. Fossil fuel provides a lot more calories than we eat in food. Biomass does not scale.
Also range is deteriorating as is, if you try to extract more than cattle does it's going to happen faster.
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The question was about not having enough space to grow plants that would be helpful in absorbing CO2.
Agriculture currently uses 17% of total land, 16% of that as you say is suitable for human food crops (grains, fruits, vegetables etc), so it is really just 2% of the total land mass. There is another 17% of US land that is grasslands currently capable of being used for cattle but generally too rugged or poor to be used for growing human food crops.
My solution is to eat more meat, as they will both eat the C
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Cows keep the grass short and convert it to dung and soil, but the fertilizer comes from the supplemental feed (usually for the chickens) with regenerative farming. Will need a lot of chickens and chickenfeed if you want to do that for rangeland.
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> How much land does that take?
Roughly 56% of the US is covered in forest. There's no labor, no fertilizer, it already has all the freshwater it needs.
And every time lumber is used the carbon captured is literally sequestered for the duration of the structure, likely longer.
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Roughly 56% of the US is covered in forest. There's no labor, no fertilizer, it already has all the freshwater it needs.
Are you saying we need to do nothing to lower CO2 emissions then?
And every time lumber is used the carbon captured is literally sequestered for the duration of the structure, likely longer.
Every time methane fuel is produced from low CO2 energy like solar, wind, or that "n-word" that shall not be spoken in polite company, we sequester carbon. We can store up solar power as methane in summer when the sun shines the most, then when winter come we can pipe that methane out to homes for heating in existing natural gas pipelines using existing furnaces. Every summer we tank up more carbon, meaning less of it in the air. We can seq
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it's called plants.
Plants are not a source of eternal CO2 sink. They consume quite a bit during the growing stages only to become almost carbon neutral when they are fully grown thanks to releasing carbon in the form of decomposition of their plant matter.
We should be planting trees EVERYWHERE. They have a positive influence on the environment in many ways including regulating weather, stabilising soil to prevent erosion, providing local cooling effects, and enhancing wildlife.
But they are *NOT* a solution or even part of a s
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This is untrue. Woodland can actually release CO2 when it is young and growing. Mature woodland, on the other hand, is an eternal CO2. The point is that the trees fall down, drop leaves, drop branches, which decompose to soil. The soil doesn't go anywhere, it just sits there, accumulating over time. Some of our peat bogs are 10m in depth, covering a massive area.
In the sea, the process can work even better. Marine grasses soak up even more CO2, and because they are hit by water currents rather than air, tur
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Climate change is already eating your lunch, you are just too pig-headed to admit it.
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It's funny how your tribe's only goal is to murder anyone who doesn't agree with them, yet when all is said and done you're still being victimized by the enemies you've failed to kill. How incompetent must your side be?
Charge efficiency? (Score:2)
Can this be used to make something like a battery by converting in a closed loop cycle between CO2 and methane then? Does the power you get out of it come close to the amount of power you have to put in to get it into a "charged" state with methane?
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Look up methane/hydrocarbon fuel cells: https://www.sciencedaily.com/r... [sciencedaily.com]
https://interestingengineering... [interestin...eering.com]
Issues probably would be contaminants poisoning the catalysts etc.
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You are missing the POINT that methane can be stored until needed rather than the power simply having to be discharged when too much of it is produced.
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Yes, you could use it in a closed loop system. The paper is not about the fact that it is possible to do this, but they are using computational simulations followed by experimentation to understand better how do this is most efficiently. If I understand the stats correctly, the reckon about 85% of the charge going in ends being converted. The energy efficiency will be lower than that for the reaction, and lower still for any system that implements this commercially. And then the methane has to be used to do
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>Can this be used to make something like a battery by converting in a closed loop cycle between CO2 and methane then?
Yes.
>Does the power you get out of it come close to the amount of power you have to put in to get it into a "charged" state with methane?
No, and it never will. No energy capture method is 100% efficient, and no method of converting heat from combustion into electricity is 100% efficient. There's always energy lost to waste heat you can't use.
However, the point here is to use excess po
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Can I get a miniature version of this that will slowly refill my gas bottle during the week from the excess solar off my roof, ready for a big weekend BBQ cook-up? Sounds ideal.
Not quite as fun as electrocatalytic of CO2 into Ethanol,
https://iopscience.iop.org/art... [iop.org]
but I guess I'll have to run that in a separate setup to provide the drinks.
I've seen Breaking Bad (Score:2)
You know that you only settle for the pure stuff. Blue methane. YOU CAN SNORT IT!!
Next up (Score:2)
Green Chlorine
Wish pertinent details were mentioned... (Score:2)
How does this compare to other known catalysts?
How much energy does this take vs. can be released by using methane?
How much energy do plants need to do the same? Separate out creation of sugar vs. creation of methane or something we can turn into methane easily (oils?).
Like a bandaid after major surgery..... (Score:2)