New Plastic Means More Fuel and Less Global Warming

Plastics may be toxic, but this one could clean the atmosphere of green house effect gases. A specially developed plastic imitating cell membrane can take carbon dioxide out of natural gas, lowering the quantities of this greenhouse gas dumped into the atmosphere.

The new material could also extract natural gas from decaying garbage and organic matter and cleanse contaminated water. The novel plastic permits the passage of carbon dioxide or other tiny molecules through its pores, but it blocks the methane molecule; the main hydrocarbon in natural gas, cannot cross this barrier.

The pores have an hourglass shape, just like the ion channels on cell surfaces. The new polymer is 4 times more effective and 100 times speedier at separating carbon dioxide than currently employed techniques are.

Pipelines delivering natural gas are prone to degradation if the comprises over 2 % carbon dioxide. But the brute product coming from the depths contains over 2 % carbon dioxide, and this requires remediation.

Carbon dioxide is also the main culprit for the human-caused global warming, and the new plastic could help decreasing its dumped amounts. The "thermally rearranged" (TR) plastic was made through a newly developed heat treatment that permits a more detailed control over the pores' diameter and shape, a tricky issue in the case of previous plastic membranes.

"You get a much broader range of sizes, so you get some that are very narrow and have very high selectivity, but you also get a lot that are large so they separate poorly", said co-author Benny Freeman of the University of Texas in Austin.

The TR plastic resists at temperatures over 600�F (316�C), when in fact its functionality was improved. This could turn it into the best solution in power plants where the separation of the greenhouse gases from natural gases occurs at extremely high temperatures. Due to its much higher permeability, the TR plastic requires 5 times less space than current membranes do. "This membrane has enormous potential to transform natural gas processing plants, including offshore platforms, which are especially crunched for space", Freeman said.