Chemists at Yale and the University of Michigan have developed a novel, scalable approach to converting methane into methanol under mild, light-driven conditions — with potential benefits for industry and the environment.
Transforming methane — a component of natural gas and a potent greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change — into liquid fuels and industrial feedstocks has long been viewed as a grand challenge for researchers. Unfortunately, most approaches to such conversions are not commercially viable, either due to high costs, a low conversion rate, or both.
In the new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers describe a new approach that may prove more effective.
The researchers developed a system for selectively exposing methane and water — on a surface of photoactive Zinc oxide — to light. The new system involves a cycling of wet and dry conditions, resulting in a robust conversion of methane into methanol.
“The main issue to resolve was preventing overoxidation, that leads to uneconomic or even harmful products such as carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide,” said Jan Paul Menzel, a postdoctoral researcher in the Yale lab of Victor Batista, and co-first author of the study. “The beauty of this work is controlling the selectivity of methane oxidation by a step wise, dual state process by cycling through dry and wet conditions, using microdoplets of water to control the reaction environment.”
Batista is the John Gamble Kirkwood Professor of Chemistry in FAS, a member of the Energy Sciences Institute and the Yale Quantum Institute, and director of the Center for Quantum Dynamics on Modular Quantum Devices.
Yale co-authors of the study are Batista and Zhuoran Long, a postdoctoral associate in Batista’s lab. The study’s corresponding authors are Songtao Tang and Zetian Mi of the University of Michigan.
