Carbon in the atmosphere is a major driver of climate change. Now researchers from McGill University have designed a new catalyst for converting carbon dioxide (CO2) into methane – a cleaner source of energy – using tiny bits of copper called nanoclusters. While the traditional method of producing methane from fossil fuels introduces more CO2 into the atmosphere, the new process, electrocatalysis, does not. “On sunny days you can use solar power, or when it’s a windy day you can use that wind to produce renewable electricity, but as soon as you produce that electricity you need to use it,” says Mahdi Salehi, Ph.D. candidate at the Electrocatalysis Lab at McGill University. “But in our case, we can use that renewable but intermittent electricity to store the energy in chemicals like methane.”
By using copper nanoclusters, says Salehi, carbon dioxide from the atmosphere can be transformed into methane and once the methane is used, any carbon dioxide released can be captured and “recycled” back into methane. This would create a closed “carbon loop” that does not emit new carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The research, published recently in the journal Applied Catalysis B: Environment and Energy, was enabled by the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan (USask). The team plans to continue refining their catalyst to make it more efficient and investigate its large-scale, industrial applications. Their hope is that their findings will open new avenues for producing clean, sustainable energy.
You said it yourself. Still undiscovered. The technology we have today can’t be used to save more than a day or so of electricity. We need to handle months. Finding more energy dense ways of doing it is crucial.
And even if we burn it and put it back in the air, it is still positive, because we won’t have added more from oil. And if we get enough of the stuff we can let the trees grow, which would be a carbon sink.
Step 1: stop using oil. If we use the methane as is, we’ve accomplished this step.
Step 2: scrub carbon from atmosphere. Upping the game and replacing wood for heating would let the trees scrub the atmosphere, creating carbon sinks
Step 3: accelerate. Can processed methsne be stored in energy dense compounds? Like oil was?