Increasing Renewable Energy Potential of Landfill Gas by Electrocatalytic Conversion of Carbon Dioxide to Methane at Low Temperature

Abstract Description: The conversion of carbon dioxide into methane at a low temperature has great potential to reduce current international environmental issues like global warming and will create new sources of renewable energy. Scientists are implementing unconventional methods like electrocatalysis and photocatalysis for low temperature methanation of carbon dioxide. However, this electrocatalytic methanation of carbon dioxide has not been implemented for landfill gas yet. The overall goal of this research is to increase renewable energy production from landfill gas (50% carbon dioxide/50% methane) by electrocatalysis of carbon dioxide into methane. Landfill gas, hydrogen gas, and helium gas were passed through a catalyst bed in a quartz glass tube in a ratio of 1: 1.09: 1.87, with an electric field imposed by two copper electrodes (top and bottom of the quartz tube) connected to a DC power supply. The catalyst used in this research was ruthenium-supported cerium oxide (CeO2) which was prepared by the impregnation method; it showed the highest catalytic activity in previous tests [Yamada, 2020]. After 20 minutes of electrocatalysis, the methane concentration increased by 27%. Impacts of other variables such as the electric field’s position, time, gas volume, current, voltage, and catalyst amount will also be analyzed in this research.