TLG - Media, page-16060

Graphite can come from a surprising source: methane
June 20, 2024

Excerpt:
”Oakland-based startup Molten Industries is working to build it by relying on something that’s cheap and abundant in the US: natural gas. The company has developed a specialized technique to break methane into graphite and hydrogen, the latter of which can be used as a source of clean energy. The effort is funded in part by a $25 million Series A financing round led by Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV).”

”To create graphite, Molten relies on pyrolysis, a technique that involves heating methane until it breaks into its constituent components of carbon and hydrogen. If there’s no oxygen or water present during this process, the methane gets split without any resulting CO2 emissions.”

”Molten says its graphite will be cost-competitive with other sources.”

”Molten has built a pilot reactor in Oakland and is constructing a full commercial-scale unit the size of a shipping container that Bush said he expects to be operational next year.”

” Whether there will be demand for the latter in the coming decades remains to be seen, though. Other materials like silicon, lithium and hard carbon may begin to compete with graphite as the default material in battery anodes, according to BloombergNEF. The shift could potentially halve demand by 2035.”

https://www.mining.com/web/key-ev-battery-material-can-come-from-a-surprising-source-methane/

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