14 DAY TRIAL // Using initial funding totaling $20 million, researchers at the San Francisco, California-based startup Siluria are now trying to develop a method of transforming methane directly into ethylene. If they succeed, then they could change the way a wide variety of plastics and chemicals are produced.
Methane is the primary component of natural gas, whereas ethylene is a staple substance for a large array of chemical reactions and critically-important materials, such as plastics. At this point, creating ethylene is a rather complex process, despite it being so desirable and important.
If they manage to create the technique they imagine, Siluria engineers will essentially find a way to transform natural gas into the basic compound needed to create plastic. At this point, the technology is still being tested in the laboratory, but experts at the company say they are making progress.
In order to produce ethylene from methane, the team needs to develop a catalyst capable of selecting only the methane molecules, and force them to react with oxygen. Leading venture capital firms provided the $13.3 million the company used for the initial tests.
The Wellcome Trust became involved with the new funding effort due to the fact that the work is very promising. Siluria engineers apparently plan to use a host of screening technologies combined with nanotechnology in order to achieve their objective.
In the lab, the company already has several families of compounds that can be used as catalysts to obtain the desired result. At this point, scientists are working towards improving the efficiency of these chemicals, so that they may be used in real-life as well, Technology Review reports.
At this point, ethylene is made from petroleum. The chemical's market is worth about $160 billion annually, and the United States relies on foreign oil much more than it does on its own natural gas supplies. With this in mind, the need for the catalysts Siluria is developing becomes obvious.
With this technology available, the country may stop paying Arab countries for oil, and use internal natural gas supplies to produce the much-needed chemical. Methane is also considerably cheaper than oil, and is available in the continental US.
Both Congress and the White House have said that they want to rid the US of its dependency on foreign oil, and this may finally be their chance to do so.