Researchers develop potentially low-cost, low-emissions technology that can convert methane without forming CO2

Steam methane reforming (SMR) has been

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commercialized for decades and is the most common process for producing commercial hydrogen. However, the researchers point out, SMR consumes significant amounts of energy and necessarily produces carbon dioxide, which is usually released into the atmosphere. When the process was introduced, CO2 was not considered a problem. But as we became more greenhouse gas-conscious, it has grown into a global concern. The cost of operating the SMR process, and the potential additional costs of carbon taxes and carbon sequestration, puts hydrogen production by SMR at risk for significant cost increases—especially in smaller scale operations that might provide the hydrogen needed for fuel cell vehicles.

The UCSB team includes a longstanding collaboration on catalytic approaches to natural gas conversion between theoretical chemist and professor Horia Metiu and McFarland. Together with chemical engineering professor Michael Gordon, they began investigating the use of molten metals and molten salts as interesting and unexplored catalytic systems. Metiu's theoretical work suggested that different combinations of metals in molten alloys might provide increased catalytic activity for converting methane into hydrogen and solid carbon. The researchers have developed a single-step method by which methane can be converted into hydrogen, which is not only simpler and potentially less expensive than conventional SMR methods, and results in a solid form of carbon that can be readily transported and stored indefinitely.
https://phys.org/news/2017-11-potentially-low-cost-low-emissions-technology-methane.html