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Biofuels

Opinion

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The potent greenhouse gas cannot be captured like carbon dioxide, so scientists are developing strategies to destroy it.

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20240327T11:27:00.000+05:30 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 102, Issue 20
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Uma Chatterjee leaning over a workbench to look into a microscope.
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Uma Chatterjee, a neuroscience PhD student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, says it can be nerve racking to ask for accommodations.

Along metal box hooked to a jumble of hoses, gauges, and measuring instruments sits in a laboratory at the University of Copenhagen’s Chemistry Department. Inside, at one end, ultraviolet light-emitting diodes glow an eerie purple. This reaction chamber has been built to destroy methane using UV light and chlorine. If installed in livestock barns, a larger version of this device could keep thousands of metric tons of the greenhouse gas from reaching the atmosphere, says Matthew Johnson, the chemistry professor leading the work.

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Johnson is also cofounder and CEO of the start-up Ambient Carbon. The company plans to commercialize the technology to eradicate methane emissions from farms, wastewater treatment plants, and biogas plants, all of which release the greenhouse gas at concentrations too low to burn off. Three-quarters of all methane sources, in fact, emit the gas at low concentrations—under 1,000 ppm—Johnson says. “Today, there are no efficient solutions on the market. And that’s the gap we address with this technology.”

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In terms of reducing emissions, CO2 has a 50-year head start on methane. Dozens of carbon capture plants operate around the world, grabbing CO2 from gas mixtures using materials and methods that scientists have honed over decades.

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Not only has methane reduction technology been slow out of the gate, but methane is a more elusive, complicated beast than CO2. Besides its low atmospheric concentration, methane is relatively inert, and the molecule is similar in size to nitrogen, which is far more abundant. Those factors make it hard to grab methane using chemical or size-based approaches, says Christopher Jones, a chemical engineer and carbon capture expert at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “There’s much more CO2, and it’s easier to grab. If direct air capture of CO2 is in the late-adolescent-to-tween stage, methane removal is an infant.”

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