Grant: Canada Research Chairs

Canada has the ambition to become a leader with respect to reducing methane emissions and was one of the first countries to sign the Global Methane Pledge for 2030 proposed at COP26. As much as 50 % of Canada's methane emissions are from agriculture and municipalities (landfills and wastewater treatment) while another 40 % comes from oil and gas operations. When oil is pumped from deep reservoirs, dissolved methane comes out of solution. This methane has little value in remote regions and is flared or vented. This avoidable burden to the environment not contributes to global warming due to CO2 and methane, it also emits toxic compounds like sulphur and heavy metals including mercury. The International Energy Agency estimates that the volume of gas flared and vented amounts to the equivalent of 10000 barrels of oil per DAY. Most of these emissions come from thousands of small wells that produce valuable light crude and natural gas in remote regions where pipeline infrastructure is too costly to recover it. The CRC will design and build pilot plant facilities to demonstrate technologies that are economic at this small scale. In the first step, the CRC will design an electrified radial flow reactor that is original as it combines intermittent feeding of reactants and applies electrical heating during the endothermic step (methane to carbon) to maintain catalytic activity. This reaction sequence and heating configuration is expected to surpass the thermodynamic limitations of co-feeding the methane and air together and will allow lower temperature operation (700 oC rather than >1000 oC) and achieve CO and H2 yield exceeding 95 % (rather than 80 %). Operating with methane and air at high pressure (2 MPa) and temperature represents safety hazards and so a considerable effort will be devoted to identifying operating scenarios and configurations to minimize/eliminate any risk of deflagration (or detonation). The CRC will also develop catalysis synthesis recipes that are amenable to large scale commercialization. Bench-top synthesis techniques generally produce less than 5 g in a lot and the recipes often require over 4 days. The thrust of the CRC will identify techniques to reduce the synthesis times to mere hours and apply spray drying technology that scales up to a capacity of 1000 kg/h of catalyst. The lot size for the CRC will nominally be 10 kg of catalyst.