Researchers successfully convert methane gas into liquid methanol | Hacker News Reader

Researchers successfully convert methane gas into liquid methanol

scitechdaily.com

71 pointsgeox43 comments

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...

I wonder how efficient the conversion in the article would be, after being adapted to real world "dirty" methane instead of pure.

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.

“Burning it efficiently on site” might not be as easy as previously thought.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/29/climate/gas-flaring-clima...

Synthetic methane has very controllable levels of contaminants. If this can use an abundant catalyst or small enough amounts of rare elements it's a good steptowards powering a lot of existing infrastructure with sunlight.

Another company in this space is Lanzatech. Michael Liebreich had the CEO on his podcast a few weeks ago: https://www.cleaningup.live/ep100-dr-jennifer-holmgren-brewi...

They actually are able to convert co2 directly (using microbes) but also work with methane from e.g. waste.

For context, efficient conversion from Methane to Methanol is difficult. You can order single carbon organic molecules going from reduced to oxidized (high energy to low energy) Methane > Methanol > Formaldehyde > Formic Acid > Carbon Monoxide > Carbon Dioxide. You can step down this chain via oxidization. The most extreme case, combustion, is really easy. But once you provide an oxidizing environment, it's hard to stop a particular step. It's much easier to go the other direction and produce Methanol by reducing Carbon Monoxide with Hydrogen, but this takes extreme pressures and temperatures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol#From_synthesis_gas

Conversion of methane into methanol is a large scale industrial process that underpins much of the chemical industry. This post's title is misleading, and the original title is slightly more informative: "New Method Converts Greenhouse Gas Into Fuel".

>Conversion of methane into methanol is a large scale industrial process

Since the 1980's.

I hope it's a new method and more energy efficient (that's what happened then), but producers are turning as much natural gas into methanol as the current market can handle already.

Which the market was already that way before the 1980's came along too.

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

> Just disingenuous and uncritical reporting all around

Yeah, the jump from "we converted some hydrocarbon into an alcohol at lab scale" to "revolutionary new energy breakthrough" is a bit much. And all too common. Rearranging C, O, and H is routine. It's whether this thing makes sense energetically and financially that's the big deal.

I kind of liked ethanol from cellulose. There's plenty of excess cellulose from agricultural waste. There are processes that work. But not ones that are profitable.

> "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... "

So they're covering it up yet pointing it out directly.

Using fossil fuels more efficiently is good, and is consistent with using them less. Using fossil gas more efficiently will keep it in the ground longer, meanwhile we make progress on renewables which keeps gas in the ground longer, etc.

Biomethane is a large source of energy. Currently in Germany more electricity is produced from it than from fossile methane. https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&...

> Our success in obtaining methanol under mild conditions, while also expending less energy, is a major step forward.

The energy it took to produce the liquid methanol was higher than what the output can produce.

Spending 2 liter of fuel to recover 1 liter of fuel. Well.. you do the maths.

Good to see progress though!

That's pretty much standard with chemistry. Have fun trying to violate thermodynamics.

I suspect the point is that we would be better off just burning the methane at the source and putting the energy we would have used converting it to methanol instead towards whatever energy the methanol would have eventually been used for.

Spending $1 today to get $0.50 tomorrow isn't a good idea.

It really depends. Methanol is liquid at STP conditions, whereas methane isn't, and either needs to be stored under pressure or cryogenically. Methane also boils off, leaks, and is a potent greenhouse gas. Methanol breaks down naturally in the environment, etc.

Most appeals to the second law of thermodynamics are meaningless without additional context. We routinely make energy and chemical conversions that lose recoverable energy, but we do so because either we need the feedstock for something, or because things like fungibility and storage matter.

I mean let's be candid, the folks working on this have likely forgotten more about thermodynamics than most folks here have ever learnt. Methane to methanol has been a holy grail of chemical engineering for a while, and I'd imagine there's a lot more to it than first year physics.

I'm saying this will only become viable when the energy being put into the conversion to methanol (not creation of methane), is lower than the energy stored in the methanol. That does not violate thermodynamics.

You have excess of said fuel in the first place. It's better to sell 1/2 of your stock than flare all of it.

Not if it costs more fuel to capture it than you would gain.

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.

If we crack fusion, or use other renewable energy systems, technologies such as these will make chemical fuels into a closed loop industry.

We have a bright future ahead, gents

Or our entire civilization will collapse into famine and war because we refused to transition off of fossil fuels in time. That methane needs to stay in the ground.

How is this better, climate wise, than burning the methane directly? Methanol still has the same amount of carbon in it.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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 cleaner-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.2021.6633...

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?

Above its critical point, (-82.59°C) it won't condense into a liquid. It will continue compressing into a supercritical fluid, which will take a very high pressure to equal the density of liquid methane. The gas is about 0.7g/L at STP, the liquid is 422g/L at 1 atm at its boiling point. You'd need 600 atmospheres or 8862 PSI. A typical cylinder is around 2500-3000 psi.

Liquid methane is distributed refrigerated.

Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) is mostly methane with some ethane and is typically transported in cryogenic containers as it would require too much pressure to otherwise keep it in a liquid state. Even when transported in cryogenic tanks there is some boil off that is either captured and recompressed or used as fuel for the tanker.

Liqified Petroleum Gas (LPG) is a mixture of propane and butane which does not require cryogenic storage and will remain liquid.

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.

> 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.

> Researchers successfully convert methane gas into liquid methanol

That's why a lot of researches remain in obscurity: have they tried a step further and obtained ethanol, they would be heroes. But they stopped /s

How much sense would it make to do solar -> hydrogen -> methane -> methanol?

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.

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.

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-...

Hydrogen is incredibly dangerous and bulky. Using it where you create it works well enough, but without some breakthrough in metal hydride storage or similar it's starting to look like a poor choice even against batteries if you want to move your energy around.

Stuff that can store as a liquid opens a lot of possibilities, although this probably means ammonia most of the time.

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.

> methane, a potent greenhouse gas, to be utilized to make fuel

So you can burn it and release a different greenhouse gas. Total result: more energy used and more heath released into the atmosphere.

Very cool.

Methane can be fully neutral when produced from biomass (and this is not a marginal use) Storing the energy as a liquid rather than a gas can also provide some advantage like for fuel cells.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com