Carbon Neutral Methane Obtained Cheaply From CO2 and Water

methane-from-co2-h2oWe all know most of world’s greatest inventions have been made by mistake. A team of researchers from the Penn State, led by Bruce E.Logan, Kappe Professor of Environmental Engineering, discovered how to produce methane from water and carbon dioxide. Here’s what he says: “We were studying making hydrogen in microbial electrolysis cells and we kept getting all this methane. We may now understand why.”

They discovered a microbe that produces that methane, more than expected under normal circumstances, by adding a small voltage on their testing solution. The microbe is called Archaea, and it can convert CO2 and water to methane without any other organic material, bacterial or hydrogen normally found in microbial electrolysis cells.



The whole system has about 80 percent efficiency, and if the electricity is derived from renewable and carbon-free sources like the Sun and the wind, then the process as a whole would be carbon-neutral, because when burned, the methane’s CO2 output would match the CO2 input of the producer. The only problem would be that the burning would take place far from where it has been produced, but integrated on a larger scale, it’s the same.

Methane is preferred to hydrogen, at least economically, because an infrastructure of transporting it already exists all over the world.

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