As per the title, I’m curious of your thoughts on this concept. Methane from landfills are already used as a source of energy in many cases, but according to the EPA, a tremendous amount are not, and contribute 14% to the US’s methane gas emissions.
I’m not terribly happy how the inventors of this tech are trying to keep it a trade secret, and their estimate that an installation will cost between 1 to 10 million takes it out of reach a backyard solarpunk from taking advantage of it (though it sounds like it could be DIY’d with enough know-how).
On the face of it, if it makes more landfills become viable as a source of energy to reduce use of fossil fuels, it seems like it could be a useful tool against climate change. The best case scenario would be that a local energy co-op is able to afford the initial startup cost to get it operational, ideally using repurposed engines from used cars.
What do y’all make of it?
My background is chemical engineering. From this brief article, it sounds like a decent proposition. Basically taking a diesel engine and powering it with methane, but feeding it excess methane. Enough methane combusts to power the engine, which also powers the downstream processes. The excess methane is reformed to hydrogen without being fully oxidized to carbon dioxide and water. The nascent hydrogen is fed to some downstream process to create methanol.
This seems like a good way to produce a needed fuel / feedstock without additional energy inputs. I would be interested in seeing a full life cycle analysis of the system.