New methane separation device reduces greenhouse gas emission

BEIJING — Chinese technologists have developed a new industrial device to purify methane from the coal-bed gas, finding a solution to reduce a big chunk of China’s greenhouse gas emission.

Yang Kejian, a veteran technologist at the Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), led his research team to develop the device, which is used for sucking coal-bed gas, a combination of methane, oxygen and nitrogen, and producing highly-purified methane, a clean energy equivalent to natural gas.
As key steps of their experiment, Yang and his team installed two sets of such device on two different coal pits in Yangquan and Jincheng, both big coal fields in north China’s Shanxi Province.

With the device like a huge refrigerator, the technologists freeze the combined coal-bed gas under 200 degrees Celsius below zero, and separate methane, oxygen and nitrogen from each other thanks to their different evaporation points, Yang said in an interview with Xinhua on Saturday.

“The technology not only produces commercialized methane, but also help reduce greenhouse effect resulting from randomly emitting methane to the air,” Yang said.

The usually combined coal-bed gas, which is highly explosive if aggregating to a certain density, also poses deadly threat to coalminers.

Coal mine explosions were often triggered by the gas. No coal mining companies have found ways better than pumping the coal-bed gas out of pits and letting it melt in the air.

Xinhua