Decreasing methane emissions is a high precedence within the battle towards local weather change due to its propensity to entice warmth within the ambiance: Methane’s warming results are 84 instances stronger than CO2 over a 20-year timescale.
And but, as the primary element of pure fuel, methane can be a worthwhile gas and a precursor to a number of essential chemical substances. The principle barrier to utilizing methane emissions to create carbon-negative supplies is that human sources of methane fuel — landfills, farms, and oil and fuel wells — are comparatively small and unfold out throughout massive areas, whereas conventional chemical processing services are large and centralized. That makes it prohibitively costly to seize, transport, and convert methane fuel into something helpful. Consequently, most firms burn or “flare” their methane on the web site the place it’s emitted, seeing it as a sunk price and an environmental legal responsibility.
The MIT spinout Emvolon is taking a brand new method to processing methane by repurposing automotive engines to function modular, cost-effective chemical vegetation. The corporate’s techniques can take methane fuel and produce liquid fuels like methanol and ammonia on-site; these fuels can then be used or transported in customary truck containers.
“We see this as a brand new means of chemical manufacturing,” Emvolon co-founder and CEO Emmanuel Kasseris SM ’07, PhD ’11 says. “We’re beginning with methane as a result of methane is an considerable emission that we will use as a useful resource. With methane, we will clear up two issues on the identical time: About 15 % of worldwide greenhouse fuel emissions come from hard-to-abate sectors that want inexperienced gas, like delivery, aviation, heavy heavy-duty vehicles, and rail. Then one other 15 % of emissions come from distributed methane emissions like landfills and oil wells.”
By utilizing mass-produced engines and eliminating the necessity to spend money on infrastructure like pipelines, the corporate says it’s making methane conversion economically enticing sufficient to be adopted at scale. The system may take inexperienced hydrogen produced by intermittent renewables and switch it into ammonia, one other gas that will also be used to decarbonize fertilizers.
“Sooner or later, we’re going to wish inexperienced fuels as a result of you may’t electrify a big ship or airplane — it’s a must to use a high-energy-density, low-carbon-footprint, low-cost liquid gas,” Kasseris says. “The power sources to supply these inexperienced fuels are both distributed, as is the case with methane, or variable, like wind. So, you can not have an enormous plant [producing green fuels] that has its personal zip code. You both should be distributed or variable, and each of these approaches lend themselves to this modular design.”
From a “loopy concept” to an organization
Kasseris first got here to MIT to review mechanical engineering as a graduate pupil in 2004, when he labored within the Sloan Automotive Lab on a report on the way forward for transportation. For his PhD, he developed a novel know-how for enhancing inner combustion engine gas effectivity for a consortium of automotive and power firms, which he then went to work for after commencement.
Round 2014, he was approached by Leslie Bromberg ’73, PhD ’77, a serial inventor with greater than 100 patents, who has been a principal analysis engineer in MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Heart for almost 50 years.
“Leslie had this loopy concept of repurposing an inner combustion engine as a reactor,” Kasseris recollects. “I had checked out that whereas working in trade, and I preferred it, however my firm on the time thought the work wanted extra validation.”
Bromberg had completed that validation by way of a U.S. Division of Vitality-funded project by which he used a diesel engine to “reform” methane — a high-pressure chemical response by which methane is mixed with steam and oxygen to supply hydrogen. The work impressed Kasseris sufficient to deliver him again to MIT as a analysis scientist in 2016.
“We labored on that concept along with another initiatives, and finally it had reached the purpose the place we determined to license the work from MIT and go full throttle,” Kasseris recollects. “It’s very straightforward to work with MIT’s Expertise Licensing Workplace if you end up an MIT inventor. You may get a low-cost licensing choice, and you are able to do quite a bit with that, which is essential for a brand new firm. Then, as soon as you might be prepared, you may finalize the license, so MIT was instrumental.”
Emvolon continued working with MIT’s analysis group, sponsoring initiatives with Professor Emeritus John Heywood and taking part within the MIT Enterprise Mentoring Service and the MIT Industrial Liaison Program.
An engine-powered chemical plant
On the core of Emvolon’s system is an off-the-shelf automotive engine that runs “gas wealthy” — with a better ratio of gas to air than what is required for full combustion.
“That’s straightforward to say, but it surely takes plenty of [intellectual property], and that’s what was developed at MIT,” Kasseris says. “As an alternative of burning the methane within the fuel to carbon dioxide and water, you partially burn it, or partially oxidize it, to carbon monoxide and hydrogen, that are the constructing blocks to synthesize a wide range of chemical substances.”
The hydrogen and carbon monoxide are intermediate merchandise used to synthesize completely different chemical substances by way of additional reactions. These processing steps happen proper subsequent to the engine, which makes its personal energy. Every of Emvolon’s standalone techniques matches inside a 40-foot delivery container and may produce about 8 tons of methanol per day from 300,000 customary cubic toes of methane fuel.
The corporate is beginning with inexperienced methanol as a result of it’s a great gas for hard-to-abate sectors corresponding to delivery and heavy-duty transport, in addition to a wonderful feedstock for different high-value chemical substances, corresponding to sustainable aviation gas. Many delivery vessels have already transformed to run on inexperienced methanol in an effort to satisfy decarbonization targets.
This summer season, the corporate additionally obtained a grant from the Division of Vitality to adapt its course of to supply clear liquid fuels from energy sources like photo voltaic and wind.
“We’d prefer to broaden to different chemical substances like ammonia, but in addition different feedstocks, corresponding to biomass and hydrogen from renewable electrical energy, and we have already got promising leads to that path” Kasseris says. “We predict we now have a very good answer for the power transition and, within the later levels of the transition, for e-manufacturing.”
A scalable method
Emvolon has already constructed a system able to producing as much as six barrels of inexperienced methanol a day in its 5,000 square-foot headquarters in Woburn, Massachusetts.
“For chemical applied sciences, individuals speak about scale up danger, however with an engine, if it really works in a single cylinder, we all know it is going to work in a multicylinder engine,” Kasseris says. “It’s simply engineering.”
Final month, Emvolon introduced an settlement with Montauk Renewables to construct a commercial-scale demonstration unit subsequent to a Texas landfill that may initially produce as much as 15,000 gallons of inexperienced methanol a yr and later scale as much as 2.5 million gallons. That undertaking could possibly be expanded tenfold by scaling throughout Montauk’s different websites.
“Our complete course of was designed to be a really life like method to the power transition,” Kasseris says. “Our answer is designed to supply inexperienced fuels and chemical substances at costs that the markets are prepared to pay at the moment, with out the necessity for subsidies. Utilizing the engines as chemical vegetation, we will get the capital expenditure per unit output near that of a big plant, however at a modular scale that allows us to be subsequent to low-cost feedstock. Moreover, our modular techniques require small investments — of $1 to 10 million — which are shortly deployed, one after the other, inside weeks, versus huge chemical vegetation that require multiyear capital development initiatives and price tons of of hundreds of thousands.”
