Once again, MIT researchers are doing their part to come up with incredible solutions to flight climate change. They have managed to create a dirt-cheap solution that helps lessen methane emissions in the air, which is one of the leading causes of global warming. And even more amazing, they’re using minerals that are normally found in regular cat litter.
Methane happens to be the most potent of all greenhouse gases, more than carbon dioxide for that matter. And it is also the most emitted by such origins as mining, dairy farming, and slash-and-burn agriculture.
Doctoral student Rebecca Brenneis, who wrote the paper where the findings were published in the ACS Environment Au journal, says “A lot of the methane is from distributed and diffuse sources, so we started to think about how you could take that out of the atmosphere.”
The MIT team of scientists, including Associate Professor Desiree Plata, joined together to develop this new approach that utilizes the overly abundant and low-cost type of “dirt” or clay named zeolite.
In fact, zeolite clays are so inexpensive that these days, they are actually used to make cat litter. The team found that the manufacturers treat the zeolite with small portions of copper, which makes the material quite effective at absorbing methane from the air, even if they are in very low concentrations at that.
When they did their lab tests, the packed miniscule particles of the copper-enhanced zeolite material into a reaction tube, then heated from the outside as the stream of gas, keeping methane levels kept in between the ranges from just 2 parts per million up to 2 percent concentration, which flowed through the tube. They also explained that ‘that range covers everything that might exist in the atmosphere, down to subflammable levels that cannot be burned or flared directly.’
Piata shared that the process has a number of advantages over the other approaches to eliminating the methane from air. Other types of methods normally use pricey catalysts, like palladium or platinum, which need extreme temperatures of at least 600 degrees Celsius, while also normally needing risky and complex processes involving oxygen, which is a known combustible, as well as methane.
According to Brenneis, “The 600 degrees where they run these reactors makes it almost dangerous to be around the methane.”
Shared in the MIT News, Plata shared, “I think we’re still surprised at how well it works.”
Moreover, MIT uses a process that can work at methane concentrations that are lower than other methods, by even small fractions of 1 percent, which most methods fail to remove. In addition, they can do this in air instead of pure oxygen, which is a major advantage for real-world deployment, they explain.
This method also converts the methane into carbon dioxide, and while that may seem like a bad thing due to the continuous worldwide efforts to combat the carbon dioxide emissions, Plata explains that carbon dioxide is much less impactful in the atmosphere as compared to methane, which happens to be around ‘80 times stronger as a greenhouse gas over the first 20 years, and about 25 times stronger for the first century.’
The scientists also share that ‘even converting half of the atmosphere’s methane to carbon dioxide would increase CO2 levels by less than 1 part per million (about 0.2 percent of today’s atmospheric carbon dioxide) while saving about 16 percent of total radiative warming.’
The most ideal locations to collect the gases would be at coal mines and dairy barns. Most of the time, these areas have incredibly strong air-handling systems in use, mostly because methane buildup has a tendency to be a health, fire, and explosion hazard otherwise.
The U.S. Department of Energy recently awarded the team a $2 million grant in order to continue doing their research and developing particular equipment for the removal of methane in these types of locations and areas. For the next phase of their research, the team will focus on ways to mold and structure the clay material so that it will help with the flow of bigger volumes of gas.
The scientists cite one possible major advantage that this new system has, which is that the chemical process used releases heat. As the methane is oxidized, the process outcome is a flame-free form of combustion. When then methane concentration sits above 0.5 percent, the released heat is bigger than the heat that’s used to get the process started, and the heat that is released can be used to create excess electricity.
According to Plata, the team’s calculations show that “at coal mines, you could potentially generate enough heat to generate electricity at the power plant scale, which is remarkable because it means that the device could pay for itself.”
Within the next 18 months, the team aims to show the conception under more challenging conditions other than what they’ve done in their lab. In the end, the hope is that they’ll be able to create devices that would be compatible with air-handling systems that are already in existence and simply just become an added component to what’s already in place.
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