Methane pyrolysis
Split methane into hydrogen and solid carbon, and the CO2 never forms in the first place.
Early packs get chosen by who asks for them. If your laboratory would use this, saying so genuinely moves it up the list — and costs you nothing.
The problem
Steam methane reforming produces hydrogen and a great deal of CO2. Pyrolysis splits the same molecule into hydrogen and solid carbon instead, moving the carbon into a handleable product rather than the atmosphere.
The difficulty is catalyst and reactor systems that survive continuous operation while carbon accumulates, and an economic answer that depends on whether the solid carbon is a valuable co-product or a disposal cost.
How the pack would work
- Interatomic potentials and thermodynamic models across catalyst and molten-media systems.
- Carbon handling treated as an economic variable rather than a footnote.
- Closure to cost per kilogram with the carbon co-product valued explicitly.
- Candidate space
- Catalyst and molten-media systems
- What one experiment costs
- Reactor campaigns
- Predictor
- Interatomic potentials and thermodynamic models
- Decides on
- Cost per kilogram, plus carbon co-product value
What it would take to build
Stated plainly, because these are the things we do not have yet.
Agreement on how to value the solid carbon, which dominates the economics.
Benchmark data from reactor campaigns under realistic carbon loading.
Questions
Why is the carbon so important?
Because it can swing the economics either way. Treated as a saleable co-product the numbers look very different from treating it as waste, and an honest model has to make that assumption visible rather than buried.