Partnership develops technology to convert methane gas, a common by-product of oil production, into methanol

26-Jan-2023

Most people realize the climate impacts of carbon dioxide. Not many people, however, know that methane, the main component of natural gas, is much more potent than carbon dioxide. While methane doesn’t remain in the atmosphere as long as CO2 (which can linger for thousands of years), it is 84 ...

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Chameleon I hides a wealth of frozen molecules

25-Jan-2023

The discovery of diverse ices in the darkest, coldest regions of a molecular cloud measured to date has been announced by an international team of astronomers using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. This result allows astronomers to examine the simple icy molecules that will be ...

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New reactor concept for methanation: Direct feed into the gas grid

18-Jan-2023

Synthetic energy carriers are carbon-neutral and make renewable energy transportable and storable in the long term. Synthetically produced methane is one of them. The problem: The production involves rather high energy losses; moreover, existing processes require the methane to be purified. To ...

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"Innosuisse Certificate" for Empa Spin-off: Ready for sustainable growth

12-Dec-2022

Founded in February 2018 as an Empa spin-off, the start-up company "MIRO Analytical" received one of the coveted "Innosuisse Certificates" in October. The certificate reflects the remarkable progress the young company made during the funding agency's coaching program and confirms that the ...

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Can a carbohydrate actually suck methane, a greenhouse gas, directly out of the air?

22-Nov-2022

Researchers at the University of Copenhagen’s Faculty of Science are in the process of finding out. Methane gas is 86 times more potent than CO2 and one of the major contributors to global warming. It is estimated that methane accounts for 30 percent of all global warming from gaseous emissions. ...

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Electrochaea's commercial 10-megawatt biomethanation plant engineering completed

06-Oct-2022

Electrochaea has completed the engineering for the first standardized 10 MWe biomethanation plant designed for commercial operation. A 10 MWe plant can produce several million cubic meters of renewable synthetic methane per year that replaces any use of fossil natural gas. Electrochaea offers a ...

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“We want to stop releasing methane and start harnessing it and do so in lieu of burning it”

06-Oct-2022

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that is 25 times more damaging to the environment per molecule than carbon dioxide, according to theU.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Bacteria at the bottom of the sea can remove methane from their surroundings, entirely without oxygen, through a process ...

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Single gold atoms catalyze the selective methanization of carbon dioxide

15-Sep-2022

One step toward carbon dioxide (CO2) neutrality and the mitigation of both the greenhouse effect and the energy crisis would be to convert CO2 into hydrocarbon-based fuels like methane using light. In the journal Angewandte Chemie, a Chinese research team has introduced a highly effective ...

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Novel perovskite catalysts could be used wherever methane and carbon dioxide are produced simultaneously

05-Sep-2022

CO2 and methane can be turned into valuable products. But until now the catalysts required for such reactions quickly lose their effectiveness. TU Wien has now developed more stable alternatives. Wherever the production of harmful greenhouse gases cannot be prevented, they should be converted ...

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Special synthesis device can test many different chemical mixtures one after the other, as if on an assembly line

11-Aug-2022

Crystals consisting of wildly mixed ingredients - so-called high-entropy materials - are currently attracting growing scientific interest. Their advantage is that they are particularly stable at extremely high temperatures and could be used, for example, for energy storage and chemical production ...

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