move: New Reactor Concept for Methanation — Robust and Flexible to Synthetic Methane

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February 2, 2023

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by Annina Schneider (EMPA) 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 change this, Empa researchers have developed a new, optimized reactor concept for methanation.

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Synthetic energy carriers – i.e. those that are obtained from renewable energy through chemical conversion processes – are one of the most promising options. The use of such energy carriers only produces as much CO₂ as was previously removed from the atmosphere for their production.

Artificially produced methane falls into this category. “Synthetic gas offers enormous potential if it is produced from atmospheric CO₂ and renewably generated hydrogen,” explains Christian Bach, head of Empa’s Automotive Powertrain Technologies lab. “However, for hydrogen production you need a lot of water as well as renewable electricity. In our mobility demonstrator move, we thus want to extract not only CO₂ but also the water for hydrogen production directly from the atmosphere with the help of a CO₂ collector from the ETH spin-off Climeworks.” In future, such concepts could be implemented in desert regions lacking liquid water supplies.

However, the production of synthetic methane from hydrogen and CO₂ – so-called methanation– has its pitfalls. This is because methane produced by such a catalytic process still contains hydrogen, which prevents it from being fed directly into the gas grid. Empa researchers Florian Kiefer, Marin Nikolic, Andreas Borgschulte and Panayotis Dimopoulos Eggenschwiler have therefore developed a new reactor concept, in which the formation of hydrogen on the product side is prevented. This leads to a simpler process control and a better suitability for dynamic operation, e.g. for coupling with unsteadily available renewable energies. The project is supported by the Canton of Zurich, Avenergy Suisse, Migros, Lidl Switzerland, Armasuisse, Swisspower and the ETH Board.

Direct feed into the gas grid thanks to water adsorption

At move, the hydrogen-free methane is produced by a process called sorption-enhanced methanation. The idea: The water produced during the reaction is continuously adsorbed on a porous catalyst support during methanation. Continuous removal of water results in just methane as a product – in pure form – eliminating the need to purify the (previous) product mixture. At the end of the reaction, the catalyst support material is dried again by lowering the pressure – and is ready for the next reaction cycle. “This process is more flexible and stable than previous processes, but it also has some potential for energy savings because we can run it at a lower pressure and do without hydrogen separation and recirculation. However, a precise assessment of the energy efficiency will only be possible once the demonstrator is in full operation,” explains Florian Kiefer, project leader for sorption-enhanced methanation at move. READ MORE

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