Description of capability
Yogesh (Yogi) Surendranath’s group is working on a chemical process to make ethylene and hydrogen from ethane.
For background, ethylene is typically made from steam cracking of naphtha. But steam-cracking naphtha co-produces methane, and people just flare it or vent it (see Reducing methane flaring, venting, and leaking to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and increase natural gas supply).
People have looked at making ethylene from CO2, but the economics are challenging.
How would this work? Most shale gas has a few percent of ethane. The dehydrogenation is uphill, but you can make ethylene and hydrogen from that ethane electrochemically. Separating ethane and methane is not hard. And there is orders of magnitude more ethane being produced than ethylene needs in the world.
Key people
Technology Readiness Level (1-9)
This is still very early stage. Yogi has all the hardware in the lab, but haven’t filed IP.
Needs that this could potentially address
Tech specs
With alkaline processes, flowing the solution through the electrodes is the limiting factor: it’s a transport problem. Yogi doesn’t have the people to do the more translational work on this. MITei has helped with techno-economic modeling. Need to do more applied bench-scale work to de-risk some aspects (e.g. separator fabrication) and to refine the technical data for a techno-economic analysis. The anodes and cathodes work well. But the bottleneck is that to make a cell well, you need to fabricate a really good separator (and that could also unlock IP).
Estimated time & cost to commercialize
Unknown
Outstanding risks
Lots — haven’t built a proof of concept yet