[HN Gopher] Researchers successfully convert methane gas into li...
___________________________________________________________________
Researchers successfully convert methane gas into liquid methanol
Author : geox
Score : 39 points
Date : 2022-10-01 14:41 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (scitechdaily.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (scitechdaily.com)
| TSiege wrote:
| This is just greenwashing so long as the source of Methane is
| from fossil fuels. This article is doing a lot of work to cover
| up this fact. The article says, "Despite the fact that natural
| gas is a fossil fuel, its conversion into methanol produces less
| carbon dioxide (CO2) than other liquid fuels in the same
| category." Before we get into "other liquid fuels", if it comes
| from the ground it's dirty. We have to be 100% clean energy if we
| want a habitable planet.
|
| Secondly it goes on to say "methane collection from the
| atmosphere is critical for mitigating the negative consequences
| of climate change since the gas has 25 times the potential to
| contribute to global warming as CO2." This is a bullshit
| suggestion with atmospheric methane levels still measuring in the
| parts per billion range.
|
| Just disingenuous and uncritical reporting all around
| blueflow wrote:
| How is this better, climate wise, than burning the methane
| directly? Methanol still has the same amount of carbon in it.
| anonporridge wrote:
| It's not, if you assume the methane is burned completely. But
| it's being discovered that simply flaring methane isn't as
| efficient as previously thought,
| https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/09/oil-industry-flaring...
|
| So, unless you're running the methane through a generator that
| burns it much more efficiently, like bitcoin miners are doing,
| we'd be better off bottling it up as methanol where it can be
| burned efficiently elsewhere.
|
| The bigger impact is that it potentially creates a profit
| incentive to capture waste methane, so it's less likely that
| producers will cut corners and just let it vent. Why vent money
| into the atmosphere?
|
| The open question is whether conversion to methanol and
| transportation will be cheap enough to actually generate a
| profit. If not, then it will be better off just getting burned
| on site.
| blueflow wrote:
| > we'd be better off bottling it up as methanol where it can
| be burned efficiently elsewhere.
|
| Liquid gas is compressed methane, and some industries and
| cars already run by burning it. So the infrastructure already
| exists.
| anonporridge wrote:
| You mean liquefied natural gas? Yeah, that's doable, but as
| Europe is finding out right now, it's very expensive. You
| have to keep the liquefied gas sufficiently chilled all
| through transport. You wouldn't have to do that with
| methanol.
| blueflow wrote:
| I mean liquefied methane, which does not need to have
| fossil sources. It is also generated by biomass
| facilities who operate on farm waste.
|
| > You have to keep the liquefied gas sufficiently chilled
| all through transport
|
| No, just compressed. Same as with hydrogen.
| scythe wrote:
| The vapor pressure of methane is about 6.25 MPa. For
| comparison a bike tire has about 0.4 MPa, a car tire
| closer to 0.2-0.25. So you need a pretty damn good
| compressor and pressure vessel / pipeline, versus a
| simple tank for methanol. Also worth noting that the
| methanol can later be easily converted to dimethyl ether
| and used as a clean _er_ -burning diesel fuel (vapor
| pressure ~0.5 MPa), where it may be possible to convert
| existing engines:
|
| https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2021.6
| 633...
| MayeulC wrote:
| I haven't read TFA yet (edit: as I thought, it's very
| light in details), but I know it's a hassle to spring up
| gas distribution logistics where it's only a secondary
| product (oil wells). The question is: is this new method
| simple enough to put in practice at production sites?
| barbazoo wrote:
| The methane won't spend all that time in the atmosphere acting
| as a GHG much more potent than CO2.
|
| > Furthermore, methane collection from the atmosphere is
| critical for mitigating the negative consequences of climate
| change since the gas has 25 times the potential to contribute
| to global warming as CO2, for example.
| blueflow wrote:
| > In the study, the scientists used pure methane, but in the
| future, they will extract the gas from renewables such as
| biomass.
|
| No extra capture.
| [deleted]
| dimitar wrote:
| Unfortunately, this might as well mean more natural gas
| extraction and the availability of a cheap fossil fuel. This is
| why we also need carbon taxes; technology developments can impact
| the fight against climate change in unpredictable ways.
| anonporridge wrote:
| This may make it easier to bottle up and sell the methane gas as
| fuel so it can be burned efficiently elsewhere, since
| transporting gas from remote locations is very hard and
| expensive, either in pipelines or chilled and liquefied. Still
| ends up as CO2 in the atmosphere, but that's drastically better
| than methane, which eventually reacts into CO2 anyway after
| decades of 10-80x warming.
|
| This is especially true at the many sites that produce very
| small, but collectively significant, amounts of methane,
| specifically landfills (check Vespene Energy, a startup in
| California targeting this problem [0]).
|
| So, this is potentially a fantastic development because it could
| create a profit incentive to completely capture waste methane
| rather than at best flaring it (which has been found to only be
| about 91% efficient in practice [1]) or at worst simply venting
| it. Right now, the only incentive to even flare methane is
| general goodwill or fear of the stick of regulation. A carrot to
| generate money along with the stick of fines would be a much more
| powerful force to actually reduce the impact, especially in most
| of the non western world that don't have a very strong stick.
|
| [0] - https://twitter.com/Digital_Ore
|
| [1] - https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/09/oil-industry-
| flaring...
| sfink wrote:
| I wonder how efficient the conversion in the article would be,
| after being adapted to real world "dirty" methane instead of
| pure.
| anonporridge wrote:
| That is something I mentioned in another comment below.
|
| It's still an open question whether conversion to methanol,
| transportation, and sale will be cheap enough to actually
| generate a profit. It the real world, it might simply cost
| too much or be too dirty of a conversion that the numbers
| don't add up.
|
| In this case, then we will still be better off just burning
| it efficiently on site.
| im3w1l wrote:
| How much sense would it make to do solar -> hydrogen -> methane
| -> methanol?
| coderenegade wrote:
| I don't think you need to go through methane to get from
| hydrogen to methanol, you just synthesize methanol directly
| once you have the hydrogen. In fact, most methanol is made by
| splitting hydrogen from natural gas first.
|
| This is more useful for producing methanol from biogas (i.e.
| waste facilities), since the gas is produced by bacteria as
| part of the natural decay process. It's an alternative to
| producing methane catalytically from hydrogen.
| Puradolia wrote:
| There's no reason to do that. You do not want to create more
| methane, and the possibility of even a trickling of it getting
| into the atmosphere. This methane to methanol is purely to get
| rid of the methane we produce, and hopefully the methane stored
| in the atmosphere. We've got plenty of hydrogen, it's one of
| the most common elements (iirc) in the known universe, but to
| convert some into methane? Hydrogen is clean, and then make it
| toxic methane? It's much better to just use the hydrogen as
| fuel. I remember seeing an article one time about a method to
| convert hydrogen into fuel, and so it's much better to do it
| that way. Though how costly or doable on a mass scale either
| conversion is, we don't know yet.
| TimJRobinson wrote:
| This would be an alternative source of methane rather than
| getting more from the ground. If we could recycle the carbon
| in the atmosphere + hydrogen from water we could use this
| wherever methane is used currently without needing to make
| new vehicles / aircraft etc that run on hydrogen.
|
| This is a good article about it:
| https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/07/22/were-going-
| to-...
| labster wrote:
| Methane is not toxic, in fact it's frustratingly inert.
| Leading to long atmospheric residence time in decades. Unless
| you meant to type toxic methanol, which is true, but it's not
| that toxic. Just don't drink the wood alcohol, okay?
|
| I think the plan is to produce methane from hydrogen on Mars
| for the return trip on Starship. Kind of a niche case,
| though.
| aaron695 wrote:
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-10-03 23:00 UTC)