Congratulations to Sen Zhang and a team including Bob Davis and Lisa Colosi-Peterson from Engineering, on being selected for a new $2.3 million dollar award from US DOE for bioenergy development.  The title of their project is “Low-Temperature CO2 Methanation for Biogas-to-Renewable Natural Gas Conversion via Advanced Ni-Based Catalysts.”

The announcement of the awards is here: Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy Announcement

The project aims to develop a low temperature thermocatalytic CO2 methanation process to directly convert CO2 in biogas to CH4, producing pipeline quality renewable natural gas (RNG). We specifically plan to create a highly active, durable and selective Ni-based CO2 methanation catalyst that allows the reaction unit to operate at low temperature. Success of this innovation will advance the state of the art in catalyst materials for biogas-to-RNG conversion processes with improved energy efficiency, operational cost and carbon management.