When it comes to global warming and climate change, the most serious green house gases get less press than their sexier sibling, carbon dioxide. But the bad boys should get more attention- methane, carbon black and water vapor are serious business. Methane alone packs 25 times the atmospheric punch than carbon dioxide does. Luckily, scientists have figured out a way to turn methane into something we can’t get enough of: liquid fuel.

Methane is a pretty normal thing. It is produced whenever organic matter decomposes. It exists on other planets; it first got into our atmosphere via volcanic eruption. It is highly explosive itself. Now, over half the methane in the atmosphere is anthropogenic, aka from us, and mostly from our livestock (this is that farting-causes-global-warming thing you may have heard about) and energy production. Significant amounts of methane are also generated by landfills and municipal waste. So, there are a variety of sources. In many places, the main method of dealing with excess methane is to burn it off, now perceived as a huge waste (pictured). According chemist Chuck Peden, of the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, "There's a big interest in doing something with this 'stranded' methane other than flaring it off.”

As a result, researchers in China have developed a catalyst that can turn methane into benzene. Though benzene is a highly toxic carcinogen, it is also an expensive middle-man chemical used to produce a range of other products. The catalyst is molybdenum oxide, an already popular catalyst used to produce additives and chemicals like acrylonitrile. This advance is important because methane is relatively clean burning, but because it is a gas at room temperature, not a viable fuel. The catalyst will allow methane to be transferred from a gaseous to usable state.

The race to capture methane has been on for a while now. Microbes that produce methane from feedstock have been patented. Methane from landfills has been harvested and sold, a process complicated by processing and shipping a gas. Methane has also been harvested from feedlots, sewage and waste processing plants. All these processes should be facilitated with the catalyst technology, as soon as researchers figure out how to stabilize it. "We need to figure out how to get [the catalyst’s] structure and keep it that way," discovering chemist Xinhe Bao said.

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