3Novices:On a hot-tin route

Unreformed and pollution free

THERE is much talk in environmental circles of carbon capture and storage (CCS). This involves gathering up the CO₂ made by burning fossil fuels and stuffing it in underground caverns or bespoke crystalline materials where it cannot abet climate change. Such schemes tend to be complex, costly and risky. But Thomas Wetzel of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and his colleagues think they have, in the case of natural gas, found a way to capture the carbon directly from the fuel itself. Stripping carbon this way means it never gets burned, so the technique wastes too much of the energy stored in the gas to be of interest to power stations. But it does offer a method of turning methane, natural gas’s main component, into hydrogen, an important industrial chemical and specialised fuel, without releasing any CO₂.

Dr Wetzel’s idea is to crack the methane into its constituent elements, hydrogen and carbon, by heating it to the point where its molecules shake themselves apart. That would permit the hydrogen to be piped away and the carbon, in the form of a black powder, to be...Continue reading

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