Turning automotive engines into modular chemical plants to make green fuels

Reducing methane emissions is a top priority in the fight against climate change because of its propensity to trap heat in the atmosphere: Methane's warming effects are 84 times more potent than CO2 over a 20-year timescale.

And yet, as the main component of natural gas, methane is also a valuable fuel and a precursor to several important chemicals. The main barrier to using methane emissions to create carbon-negative materials is that human sources of methane gas - landfills, farms, and oil and gas wells - are relatively small and spread out across large areas, while traditional chemical processing facilities are huge and centralized. That makes it prohibitively expensive to capture, transport, and convert methane gas into anything useful. As a result, most companies burn or "flare" their methane at the site where it's emitted, seeing it as a sunk cost and an environmental liability.

The MIT spinout Emvolon is taking a new approach to processing methane by repurposing automotive engines to serve as modular, cost-effective chemical plants. The company's systems can take methane gas and produce liquid fuels like methanol and ammonia on-site; these fuels can then be used or transported in standard truck containers.

"We see this as a new way of chemical manufacturing," Emvolon co-founder and CEO Emmanuel Kasseris SM '07, PhD '11 says. "We're starting with methane because methane is an abundant emission that we can use as a resource. With methane, we can solve two problems at the same time: About 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions come from hard-to-abate sectors that need green fuel, like shipping, aviation, heavy heavy-duty trucks, and rail. Then another 15 percent of emissions come from distributed methane emissions like landfills and oil wells."

By using mass-produced engines and eliminating the need to invest in infrastructure like pipelines, the company says it's making methane conversion economically attractive enough to be adopted at scale. The system can also take green hydrogen produced by intermittent renewables and turn it into ammonia, another fuel that can also be used to decarbonize fertilizers.

"In the future, we're going to need green fuels because you can't electrify a large ship or plane - you have to use a high-energy-density, low-carbon-footprint, low-cost liquid fuel," Kasseris says. "The energy resources to produce those green fuels are either distributed, as is the case with methane, or variable, like wind. So, you cannot have a massive plant [producing green fuels] that has its own zip code. You either have to be distributed or variable, and both of those approaches lend themselves to this modular design."

From a "crazy idea" to a company

Kasseris first came to MIT to study mechanical engineering as a graduate student in 2004, when he worked in the Sloan Automotive Lab on a report on the future of transportation. For his PhD, he developed a novel technology for improving internal combustion engine fuel efficiency for a consortium of automotive and energy companies, which he then went to work for after graduation.

Around 2014, he was approached by Leslie Bromberg '73, PhD '77, a serial inventor with more than 100 patents, who has been a principal research engineer in MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center for nearly 50 years.

"Leslie had this crazy idea of repurposing an internal combustion engine as a reactor," Kasseris recalls. "I had looked at that while working in industry, and I liked it, but my company at the time thought the work needed more validation."

Bromberg had done that validation through a U.S. Department of Energy-funded project in which he used a diesel engine to "reform" methane - a high-pressure chemical reaction in which methane is combined with steam and oxygen to produce hydrogen. The work impressed Kasseris enough to bring him back to MIT as a research scientist in 2016.

"We worked on that idea in addition to some other projects, and eventually it had reached the point where we decided to license the work from MIT and go full throttle," Kasseris recalls. "It's very easy to work with MIT's Technology Licensing Office when you are an MIT inventor. You can get a low-cost licensing option, and you can do a lot with that, which is important for a new company. Then, once you are ready, you can finalize the license, so MIT was instrumental."

Emvolon continued working with MIT's research community, sponsoring projects with Professor Emeritus John Heywood and participating in the MIT Venture Mentoring Service and the MIT Industrial Liaison Program.

An engine-powered chemical plant

At the core of Emvolon's system is an off-the-shelf automotive engine that runs "fuel rich" - with a higher ratio of fuel to air than what is needed for complete combustion.

"That's easy to say, but it takes a lot of [intellectual property], and that's what was developed at MIT," Kasseris says. "Instead of burning the methane in the gas to carbon dioxide and water, you partially burn it, or partially oxidize it, to carbon monoxide and hydrogen, which are the building blocks to synthesize a variety of chemicals."

The hydrogen and carbon monoxide are intermediate products used to synthesize different chemicals through further reactions. Those processing steps take place right next to the engine, which makes its own power. Each of Emvolon's standalone systems fits within a 40-foot shipping container and can produce about 8 tons of methanol per day from 300,000 standard cubic feet of methane gas.

The company is starting with green methanol because it's an ideal fuel for hard-to-abate sectors such as shipping and heavy-duty transport, as well as an excellent feedstock for other high-value chemicals, such as sustainable aviation fuel. Many shipping vessels have already converted to run on green methanol in an effort to meet decarbonization goals.

This summer, the company also received a grant from the Department of Energy to adapt its process to produce clean liquid fuels from power sources like solar and wind.

"We'd like to expand to other chemicals like ammonia, but also other feedstocks, such as biomass and hydrogen from renewable electricity, and we already have promising results in that direction" Kasseris says. "We think we have a good solution for the energy transition and, in the later stages of the transition, for e-manufacturing."

A scalable approach

Emvolon has already built a system capable of producing up to six barrels of green methanol a day in its 5,000 square-foot headquarters in Woburn, Massachusetts.

"For chemical technologies, people talk about scale up risk, but with an engine, if it works in a single cylinder, we know it will work in a multicylinder engine," Kasseris says. "It's just engineering."

Last month, Emvolon announced an agreement with Montauk Renewables to build a commercial-scale demonstration unit next to a Texas landfill that will initially produce up to 15,000 gallons of green methanol a year and later scale up to 2.5 million gallons. That project could be expanded tenfold by scaling across Montauk's other sites.

"Our whole process was designed to be a very realistic approach to the energy transition," Kasseris says. "Our solution is designed to produce green fuels and chemicals at prices that the markets are willing to pay today, without the need for subsidies. Using the engines as chemical plants, we can get the capital expenditure per unit output close to that of a large plant, but at a modular scale that enables us to be next to low-cost feedstock. Furthermore, our modular systems require small investments - of $1 to 10 million - that are quickly deployed, one at a time, within weeks, as opposed to massive chemical plants that require multiyear capital construction projects and cost hundreds of millions."

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