(Press-News.org) A team of researchers from Stanford University and the University of Leuven in Belgium has further elucidated an intriguing process that could be an important step toward a methanol fuel economy with abundant methane as the feedstock, an advance that could fundamentally change how the world uses natural gas.
Methanol - the simplest alcohol - is used to make various products, like paints and plastics, and as an additive to gasoline. Rich in hydrogen, methanol can drive new-age fuel cells that could yield significant environmental benefits.
If natural gas, of which methane is the primary component, could be converted economically into methanol, the resulting liquid fuel would be much more easily stored and transported than natural gas and pure hydrogen. That also would greatly reduce the emissions of methane from natural gas processing plants and pipelines. Today, escaped methane, a greenhouse gas many times more potent than carbon dioxide, nearly negates the environmental advantages of natural gas over oil and coal. The team's new study in the current edition of Science is their latest to advance a low-energy way to produce methanol from methane.
"This process uses common crystals known as iron zeolites that are known to convert natural gas to methanol at room temperature," explains Benjamin Snyder, who earned his doctorate at Stanford studying catalysts to address key facets of this challenge. "But, this is extremely challenging chemistry to achieve on a practical level, as methane is stubbornly chemically inert."
When methane is infused into porous iron zeolites, methanol is rapidly produced at room temperature with no additional heat or energy required. By comparison, the conventional industrial process for making methanol from methane requires temperatures of 1000°C (1832°F) and extreme high pressure.
"That's an economically tantalizing process, but it's not that easy. Significant barriers prevent scaling up this process to industrial levels," said Edward Solomon, Stanford professor of chemistry and of photon science at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Solomon is the senior author of the new study.
Keeping the zeolites on
Unfortunately, most iron zeolites deactivate quickly. Unable to process more methane, the process peters out. Scientists have been keen to study ways to improve iron zeolite performance. The new study, co-authored by Hannah Rhoda, a Stanford doctoral candidate in inorganic chemistry, uses advanced spectroscopy to explore the physical structure of the most promising zeolites for methane-to-methanol production.
"A key question here is how to get the methanol out without destroying the catalyst," Rhoda said.
Choosing two attractive iron zeolites, the team studied the physical structure of the lattices around the iron. They discovered that the reactivity varies dramatically according to the size of the pores in the surrounding crystal structure. The team refers to it as the "cage effect," as encapsulating lattice resembles a cage.
If the pores in the cages are too big, the active site deactivates after just one reaction cycle and never reactivates again. When the pore apertures are smaller, however, they coordinate a precise molecular dance between the reactants and the iron active sites - one that directly produces methanol and regenerates the active site. Leveraging this so-called 'cage effect,' the team was able to reactivate 40 percent of the deactivated sites repeatedly - a significant conceptual advance toward an industrial-scale catalytic process.
"Catalytic cycling - the continual reactivation of regenerated sites - could someday lead to continual, economical methanol production from natural gas," said Snyder, now a postdoctoral fellow at UC-Berkeley in the Department of Chemistry under Jeffrey R. Long.
This fundamental step forward in basic science will help elucidate for chemists and chemical engineers the process iron zeolites use to produce methanol at room temperature, but much work remains before such a process might be industrialized.
Next up on Snyder's list: tackling achieving the process not only at room temperature but using ambient air rather than some other source of oxygen, such as the nitrous oxide used in these experiments. Dealing with a powerful oxidizing agent like oxygen, which is notoriously hard to control in chemical reactions, will be another considerable hurdle along the path.
For now, Snyder was both pleased and amazed by the illustrative powers of the sophisticated spectroscopic instrumentation in the Solomon labs that were leveraged for this study. These were invaluable to his understanding of the chemistry and the chemical structures involved in the methane-to-methanol process.
"It's cool how you can get some very powerful atomic-level insight, like the cage effect, from these tools that weren't available to previous generations of chemists," Snyder said.
INFORMATION:
University of Leuven researchers on this study were Max Bols, Dieter Plessers, Robert Schoonheydt and, Bert F. Sels.
In a new study from University of California San Diego School of Medicine, researchers have confirmed that patients taking statin medications had a 41 percent lower risk of in-hospital death from COVID-19. The findings were published July 15, 2021 in PLOS ONE and expand upon prior research conducted at UC San Diego Health in 2020.
Statins are commonly used to reduce blood cholesterol levels by blocking liver enzymes responsible for making cholesterol. They are widely prescribed: The Centers for Disease Control estimates that 93 percent of patients who use a cholesterol-lowering drug use a statin.
"When faced with this virus at the beginning of the pandemic, there was a lot of speculation ...
Undeniably the shark movie to end all shark movies, the 1975 blockbuster, Jaws, not only smashed box office expectations, but forever changed the way we felt about going into the water - and how we think about sharks.
Now, more than 40 years (and 100+ shark movies) on, people's fear of sharks persists, with researchers at the University of South Australia concerned about the negative impact that shark movies are having on conservation efforts of this often-endangered animal.
In a world-first study, conservation psychology researchers, UniSA's Dr Briana Le Busque and Associate Professor Carla Litchfield have evaluated how sharks are portrayed in movies, finding that ...
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- A new study shows that it is possible to use mechanical force to deliberately alter chemical reactions and increase chemical selectivity - a grand challenge of the field.
The study led by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researcher Jeffrey Moore and Stanford University chemist Todd Martinezz demonstrates how external mechanical forces alter atomic motions to manipulate reaction outcomes. The study findings are published in the journal Science.
"We think of chemical reactions as molecules moving on a surface of potential energy in the way hikers follow the contour map of mountains and valleys along a trail," said lead author Yun ...
Scientists on the hunt for an unconventional kind of superconductor have produced the most compelling evidence to date that they've found one. In a pair of papers, researchers at the University of Maryland's (UMD) Quantum Materials Center (QMC) and colleagues have shown that uranium ditelluride (or UTe2 for short) displays many of the hallmarks of a topological superconductor--a material that may unlock new ways to build quantum computers and other futuristic devices.
"Nature can be wicked," says Johnpierre Paglione, a professor of physics at UMD, the director of QMC and senior author on one of the papers. "There could be other reasons we're seeing all this wacky stuff, but ...
A new national study published in Public Health Nutrition on July 15 found that Americans experiencing food insufficiency were three times as likely to lack mental health support during the COVID-19 pandemic than those not experiencing food insufficiency.
The most extreme form of food insecurity, food insufficiency occurs when families do not have enough eat. Among a nationally representative sample of 68,611 adults who participated in the US Census Household Pulse Survey in October 2020, 11% reported food insufficiency. Of those, 24% also reported an unmet mental health need compared to 9% of food-sufficient adults.
"Hunger, exhaustion, and stress related to not getting enough food to eat may lead ...
A national study published in the Journal of Pediatrics found that Emergency Department (ED) visits by youth for self-harm were nearly 40 percent higher in rural areas compared to urban settings. Strikingly, ED visits by youth for self-inflicted firearm injuries were three times more common in rural areas. Youth from rural areas presenting to the ED for suicidal ideation or self-harm also were more likely to need to be transferred to another hospital for care, which underscores the insufficient mental health resources in rural hospitals.
"Our study used pre-pandemic data, and we know that increased attention to youth mental health is even more pressing now everywhere, ...
WINSTON-SALEM, NC, July 15, 2021 - Answering a charge from the National Science Board, the RegenMed Development Organization (ReMDO), through its RegeneratOR Workforce Development Initiative, has released the results of a national survey of regenerative medicine biomanufacturing knowledge, skills, and abilities needed for successful employment in the regenerative medicine field.
The National Science Board called for the creation of a skilled technical workforce driven by science and engineering in its 2019 report, "The Skilled Technical Workforce: Crafting America's Science and Engineering Enterprise."
"The RegeneratOR initiative ...
A screening tool used to evaluate the need for endometrial cancer biopsies in women frequently misses the signs of this cancer in Black women, according to a new study released today in JAMA Oncology.
Dr. Kemi Doll, the lead researcher, and a gynecologic oncologist with the University of Washington School of Medicine, says that the results of the study suggest that the current non-invasive option of transvaginal ultrasound, or TVUS, to determine the appropriateness of a biopsy is not sufficiently accurate or racially equitable with regards to Black women.
"Black women have an over 90% higher mortality rate after diagnosis of endometrial cancer when compared with White women in the U.S.," Doll said. "This is a long-standing disparity ...
The arrival of plants on land about 400 million years ago may have changed the way the Earth naturally regulates its own climate, according to a new study led by researchers at UCL and Yale.
The carbon cycle, the process through which carbon moves between rocks, oceans, living organisms and the atmosphere, acts as Earth's natural thermostat, regulating its temperature over long time periods.
In a new study, published in the journal Nature, researchers looked at samples from rocks spanning the last three billion years and found evidence of a dramatic change in how this cycle functioned about 400 million years ago, when plants started to colonise land.
Specifically, the researchers noted a ...
Add this to the list of real-life spidey senses: Harvard researchers have shown that jumping spiders are able to tell the difference between animate objects and inanimate objects -- an ability previously known only in vertebrates, including humans.
Using a specialized treadmill system and a point-light display animation, the team of scientists found that these spiders are able to recognize biological motion. This type of motion refers to the visual movements that come from living organisms when they are moving. The visual cue is how people, even babies, can tell someone is another person just by the way their bodies move. Many animals can do this, too.
The ability, which is critical for survival, is evolutionarily ancient since it is so widespread ...
