MIT Spinoff Turns Automotive Engines into Modular Chemical Plants
Emvolon, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) spinoff company, 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 said in a press statement. “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% of global greenhouse gas emissions come from hard-to-abate sectors that need green fuel, like shipping, aviation, heavy-duty trucks and rail. Then another 15% of emissions come from distributed methane emissions like landfills and oil wells.”
According to Emvolon and MIT, green methanol is also an excellent feedstock for other high-value chemicals, such as sustainable aviation fuel. Many shipping vessels have already been converted to run on green methanol to meet decarbonization goals.
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 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 said. “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.”
The system uses 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.
“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,” Kasseris explained.
The hydrogen and carbon monoxide are intermediate products used to synthesize different chemicals through further reactions. Those processing steps take place next to the engine, which makes its own power. Each of the company’s standalone systems fits within a 40-ft shipping container and can produce about 8 tons of methanol per day from 300,000 ft3 of methane gas.
The company plans to expand to other chemicals, such as ammonia, and feedstocks, such as biomass and hydrogen from renewable electricity.
Emvolon has already built a system capable of producing up to six barrels of green methanol a day in its 5,000-ft2 headquarters in Woburn, Massachusetts.
