Adsorption-Based Methane Removal
Methane is a tricky greenhouse gas: it has a significant global warming potential (~30) but it also has a rather short lifetime in the atmosphere, especially when compared to CO2 (30 is for GWP100).
Significant amounts are emitted due to human activities, as for example related to fossil fuels extraction/transport/use or to agricultural practices. But natural processes also contribute significantly to the total emissions.
The question we asked ourselves a couple of years ago, which also led to the EU project Repair-eu, was: what if we could selectively remove or convert methane contained in dilute, non-fossil emission streams? And how would we design such processes using adsorption?
The first scientific output from our team on this topic is now available in ACS Division of Industrial & Engineering Chemistry (I&EC).
Kian Karimi did a great job further developing existing models and applying them to this challenging separation. The results show that promising sorbents exist, but also highlight an important research gap: experimental sorbent characterization needs to better reflect the conditions relevant for methane recovery from dilute streams.
A challenging problem, but an exciting one. Hopefully, weโll be able to share a couple more works on this topic soon!
Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University
https://lnkd.in/eUbu6PsJ