Producing Methane Gas from Charcoal Left After Burning Wood

- Professor Baek Jongbeom's Team, Department of Energy and Chemical Engineering, UNIST

[Asia Economy Reporter Kim Bong-su] A technology has been developed to produce methane, the main component of natural gas, from charcoal.

Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) announced on the 14th that a research team led by Professor Baek Jong-beom of the Department of Energy and Chemical Engineering developed a hydrocarbon gas production technology using the ball-milling method. By using charcoal made by directly burning wood as the raw material, they produced methane, a type of hydrocarbon, demonstrating the potential for actual commercialization.

Professor Baek explained, “Methane gas can be easily produced by decomposing charcoal through the collision force of metal beads in ball milling,” adding, “This can be applied to the gasification production process of coal, which is similar to charcoal.”

This synthesis method involves placing carbon raw materials, hydrogen, and catalysts into a container with small metal beads, then rotating the container to induce reactions. The collision force of the beads causes the carbon raw materials to react with the catalyst, breaking strong carbon-carbon chemical bonds, and hydrogen attaches to the decomposed carbon to synthesize methane.

The research team synthesized methane gas at a high yield (99.8%) under low temperature conditions of 40℃ and normal atmospheric pressure using the newly developed synthesis method. Existing hydrocarbon production methods had yields around 80% even at high temperatures of 600℃. According to the team, this improvement is due to significantly enhancing the slow hydrocarbon gasification reaction rate by utilizing the mechanochemical energy of ball milling. Slow chemical reaction rates not only lower yields due to increased byproducts from competing reactions but also require high-temperature reaction conditions to supply energy. Notably, in a large-scale (15L) ball milling process using directly made charcoal as raw material, the methane gas production efficiency per unit of power was as high as in small-scale experiments.

Gao Feng Han, the first author and a PhD candidate in the Department of Energy and Chemical Engineering at UNIST, explained, “Hydrocarbon gasification is one of the most difficult carbon-related reactions, requiring high-temperature large-scale processes and making it hard to achieve high yields, but we solved this with a simplified ball-milling process.”

This research was published in the international chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.