Turning carbon emissions into methane fuel
New method offers potential for abundant energy savings, study finds

Tatyana Woodall
Ohio State News
woodall.52@osu.edu

Chemists have developed a novel way to capture and convert carbon dioxide into methane, suggesting that future gas emissions could be converted into an alternative fuel using electricity from renewable sources.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a greenhouse gas that accounts for a large part of Earth’s warming climate, and is produced by power plants, factories and various forms of transportation. Typical carbon capture systems aimed at reducing its presence in the atmosphere work to lower carbon dioxide emissions by isolating CO2 from other gases and converting it to useful products. However, this process is difficult to implement on an industrial scale due to the massive amount of energy required for these systems to operate.

Now, using a special nickel-based catalyst, researchers have figured out a way to save much of this precious energy by turning captured carbon dioxide directly into methane, said Tomaz Neves-Garcia, lead author of the study and a current postdoctoral researcher in chemistry and biochemistry at The Ohio State University.

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“We are going from a molecule that has low energy and producing from it a fuel that has high energy,” said Neves-Garcia. “What makes this so interesting is that others capture, recover and then convert carbon dioxide in steps, while we save energy by doing these steps simultaneously.”

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