Sirigina Devesh Sathya Sri Sairam, Goel Aditya, Nazir Shareq Mohd
Department of Chemical Engineering, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, 11428, Stockholm, Sweden.
Department of Chemical Engineering, Columbia University, New York, NY, 10027, USA.
Sci Rep. 2023 Oct 12;13(1):17290. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-44582-w.
Methane is the second largest contributor to global warming after CO, and it is hard to abate due to its low concentration in the emission sources and in the atmosphere. However, removing methane from the atmosphere will accelerate achieving net-zero targets, since its global warming potential is 28 over a 100-year period. This work presents first-of-its-kind process concepts for co-removal of methane and CO that combines the catalytic conversion of methane step (thermal/photo-catalytic) with CO capture. Proposed processes have been analyzed for streams with lean methane concentrations, which are non-fossil emissions originating in the agricultural sector or natural emissions from wetlands. If the proposed processes can overcome challenges in catalyst/material design to convert methane at low concentrations, they have the potential to remove more than 40% of anthropogenic and natural methane emissions from the atmosphere at a lower energy penalty than the state-of-the-art technologies for direct air capture of CO.
甲烷是仅次于二氧化碳的全球变暖第二大贡献者，由于其在排放源和大气中的浓度较低，很难减排。然而，从大气中去除甲烷将加速实现净零目标，因为其在100年的时间里全球变暖潜能值为28。这项工作提出了首个同时去除甲烷和二氧化碳的工艺概念，该概念将甲烷催化转化步骤（热催化/光催化）与二氧化碳捕集相结合。已对含低浓度甲烷的气流分析了所提出的工艺，这些气流是农业部门产生的非化石排放或湿地的自然排放。如果所提出的工艺能够克服催化剂/材料设计方面的挑战，以在低浓度下转化甲烷，那么它们有可能以比目前最先进的直接空气捕集二氧化碳技术更低的能源代价，从大气中去除超过40%的人为和自然甲烷排放。
