Colorado Converts CO2 to Methane

January 15, 2010

ScienceDirect - Chemical Engineering Science : Methanation of carbon dioxide by hydrogen reduction using the Sabatier process.

In light of our recent dispatches concerning Penn State University, and the work there, of Chunsan Song and Craig Grimes, on the practical recycling, into valuable hydrocarbons, of Carbon Dioxide, through the process of "Tri-reforming", we wanted to further substantiate that the Methane which is, in Penn State's technology, required for the reforming of CO2, can itself be synthesized from CO2.

We thus submit the enclosed link and following excerpt by way of even further confirmation that Methane can be synthesized from Carbon Dioxide.

Comment follows:

"Methanation of carbon dioxide by hydrogen reduction using the Sabatier process in microchannel reactors

Kriston P. Brooks, Jianli Hu, Huayang and Robert J. Kee

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA 99352, USA

Engineering Division, Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO 80401, USA

July 2006

Abstract

This paper describes the development of a microchannel-based Sabatier reactor for applications such as propellant production on Mars or space habitat air revitalization. Microchannel designs offer advantages for a compact reactor with excellent thermal control. This paper discusses the development of a Ru–TiO2-based catalyst using powdered form and its application and testing in a microchannel reactor. The resultant catalyst and microchannel reactor demonstrates good conversion, selectivity, and longevity in a compact device. A chemically reacting flow model is used to assist experimental interpretation and to suggest microchannel design approaches. A kinetic rate expression for the global Sabatier reaction is developed and validated using computational models to interpret packed-bed experiments with catalysts in powder form. The resulting global reaction is then incorporated into a reactive plug-flow model that represents a microchannel reactor."

First, mention of the Nobel Prize-winning "Sabatier process" should not be unfamiliar to any of our readers. We remind you that this Carbon Dioxide conversion and recycling technology is now being employed and further developed by NASA, as we have documented, although NASA isn't named in this Abstract. We have already quite thoroughly documented for you NASA's, and the USDOD's, development of CO2 recycling technologies.

And, so, we can make the useful product, Methane, from Carbon Dioxide, in a "compact device" that "demonstrates good conversion, selectivity, and longevity".

Then, once we have made Methane, from Carbon Dioxide, we can use it, in the "Tri-reforming" process described by Chunsan Song, at Penn State University, and others, as we have documented in these reports, to convert even more Carbon Dioxide into valuable hydrocarbons.

Note: This comes from yet another of our Federal, tax dollar-supported US National Laboratories and a school within a public, state university that was founded specifically on the profitability of the mining industry.

Doesn't it seem so strange to you, as it does to us, that we citizens of US Coal Country haven't heard anything about any about it?

Finally, isn't it interesting how, in the body of the Abstract itself, neither Carbon Dioxide nor Methane is mentioned, even once? That, when those two resources are what this entire study is all about.