Common clay could curb methane emissions

The MIT team’s approach, described in ACS Environment Au, involves treating zeolite clays with a small amount of copper, making it effective at absorbing methane from the air even at very low concentrations.

The paper’s co-author Desiree Plata, associate professor Civil and Environmental Engineering, said that while many people associate atmospheric methane with drilling and fracking for oil and natural gas, those sources only account for around 18 per cent of global methane emissions. 

The majority comes from sources such as slash-and-burn agriculture, dairy farming, coal and ore mining, wetlands and melting permafrost.

Zeolite is so inexpensive that it is currently used to make cat litter. In lab tests, tiny particles of the copper-enhanced zeolite material were reportedly packed into a reaction tube, which was heated from the outside as the stream of gas — with methane levels ranging from just two parts per million to up to two per cent concentration — flowed through the tube.