Surrey team aims for methanol from direct air capture

The project aims to capture CO2 directly from the air and use dynamic catalysis to create carbon-negative methanol whose value could offset the cost of direct air capture.

EPSRC has awarded the project £250,000 under its Adventurous Energy Research for a Sustainable Net-Zero scheme.

In a statement, Dr Melis Duyar, project lead from Surrey University, said: "Synthesising methanol would constitute a significant advancement, coupling a presently expensive but necessary method of CO2 capture from the air, with the production of a substance that can bring some revenue to offset costs and further incentivise the scaling up of direct air capture.

"The main challenge for our project will be reconciling the fact that commercial methanol synthesis takes place at high pressures [50-100 bar] and moderate temperatures [200-300^oC], while direct air capture is typically carried out in ambient conditions. We want to show that it is possible to produce methanol in mild conditions through dynamic catalysis."