A Bridge to Renewable Energies: Carbon Dioxide Methanation
Team Members Heading link
- Ahmed Alghamdi
- Joel Finlon
- Michael Simon
- Omar Takrouri
Advisors: Betul Bilgin, PhD, David Bahr
Project Description Heading link
As the world shifts towards renewable energy sources to secure the environmental future of the planet, renewable energy industries have run into the problem of energy storage. Because many renewable energy sources, including wind and solar energy, are not able to provide steady power generation throughout the day, storing renewable energy when it is overproduced so that it can be used when demand rises are crucial to the future of renewable energy technologies. The goal of this project is to design a plant located in Southern California that converts over-generated renewable energy to methane, thus chemically storing the energy to be used during electrical peak-use hours. The main driving economic factor for this project is the wide, predictable swings in electricity prices in California throughout the day. California energy prices regularly reach $0 in the middle of the day when solar energy is readily available but then rises to become some of the highest in the country in the evenings when the sun sets. Storing free and low-price energy as methane allows the sale of cheap energy from midday solar generation on the high-priced evening market. An added benefit of this process is the capture of carbon dioxide that is used in the methanation process, which allows for a carbon cycle to develop between the gas power plant and the methanation process. As the state of California sets goals for zero-carbon energy across the state, this methanation process will integrate existing natural gas power plants into a renewable energy future and utilize existing infrastructure that could otherwise be abandoned in the changing energy industry.
See supporting documentation in the team’s Box drive.