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The best is not to come? Study suggests methane storage methods are maxed out

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A new multi-organization study suggests that, when it comes to storing methane for natural gas using nanoporous materials, the current methods are as good as it gets.

David Sholl, chair of the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, and Jeff Camp, a graduate student in the Sholl Research Group, were among the authors of “The Materials Genome in Action: Identifying the Performance Limits for Methane Storage,” which was accepted on Jan. 12 for publication in the journal Energy & Environmental Science.

Because of its low energy density, natural gas has to be compressed or liquefied, which makes it difficult to integrate into vehicles. A potential solution is to store natural gas inside materials with nano-sized pores. After simulating more than 650,000 designs for nanoporous materials, Sholl, Camp and the other researchers propose that the best candidates already have been designed.

The existing methods, the researchers found, meet 70 percent of the targets for methane storage that were set by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-e). Any further research in this area, they concluded, would be redundant. 

ARPA-e wants to find a nanoporous material that can store methane at 65 bar of pressure and can do so with the same energy density of compressed natural gas at 220 bar of pressure. This means that any successful storage material must deliver the equivalent of 315 units of methane per volume unit of the material.

The research team found that the most efficient materials can store a maximum of 220 units of methane.

In what they call a “nanoporous materials genome” approach, the scientists built structure models of 650,000 different materials — including metal-organic frameworks, zeolites and porous polymer networks — on the computer and rapidly prototyped them for natural gas storage using molecular simulations.

They used the building blocks of these materials and let computers generate novel materials systematically. The performance of these materials was predicted using advanced molecular simulation techniques that were specifically developed to run on processors used in computer games with heavy graphics.

“Based on our computer simulations of thousands of real materials and hundreds of thousands of hypothetical materials, we believe that there is a true physical limit to the storage capabilities,” Camp said. “Unfortunately, this means that it is likely impossible to beat current natural-gas storage capacity by more than a few percent.”

The work also involved researchers from the University of California-Berkeley (including lead author Cory Simon), Northwestern University (Evanston, Ill.), Rice University (Houston), the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (Yuseong-gu, Daejeon, South Korea), the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley, Calif.), the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL; Sion, Switzerland) and the IBM Almaden Research Center (San Jose, Calif.).

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  • Workflow Status:Published
  • Created By:Amy Schneider
  • Created:01/26/2015
  • Modified By:Fletcher Moore
  • Modified:10/07/2016

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