Welcome, everyone, to the Innovation Flow podcast, where we break down projects and initiatives that are in our PARC program, our pilot and research program here at South Platte Renew. Thanks for listening today. I'm excited for today's episode. We have two guests on this show style talk about biogas catalytic methanation. And if you don't know what that means, that's okay because we're gonna get to it and we got experts here to tell us about it. Our first expert is Matt Young from National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Thanks for being here, Matt.

Great. Yeah, thanks, Blair. Pleasure to be here. Excited to talk about our technology and project with you.

Yeah, this is a whole new area I'm dying to learn about here. Our second guest is Brian Schmerber. He works here at South Platte Renew and as a process engineer. Midstream process engineer, so deals with our biogas system is one of his main duties. Thanks for being here, Brian.

Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me.

All right, well, let me just kick it out and let you guys have the floor and introduce yourself. Maybe go first, Matt. Tell us a little bit about your background, what you do now, and what you want to do in the future.

Sure. So, yeah, I am a chemical engineer by training and also a group manager, which means I get to work with a lot of really smart and motivated people to develop technologies that promote sustainability. And I've historically worked a lot on biofuels, so trying to take biomass and biogenic carbon to make liquid fuels to replace fossil fuels. But what we're working on now, and we'll get into it, is converting carbon dioxide into value added products. And so what I'm hoping to work on in the future is really working closely with different companies and stakeholders to get the technologies that we develop in the lab kind of out into the marketplace.

Cool. How did you get into this gig? Where did you go to school? And is this kind of what you were thinking when you were in school?

So I went to school at University of Notre Dame and then Ohio State University. So say I pick my colleges based on their football teams.

Yeah. What are the Fighting Irish and what is Ohio?

The Buckeyes.

The Buckeyes, that's right. Okay.

So, you know, fun to follow this time of year, but both good engineering programs. And so initially I didn't really know exactly where I wanted, you know, my education to take me, but I always had a passion for math and science and engineering. And as I was going through school, I thought that sustainability and kind of renewable energy applications were a really neat area. And you know, fit well with my interests. Also with kind of a lot of the work that I've learned about from Brian going on with South Platte renew.

Cool. Well, thanks for being here. How about you, Brian? What. What's your story?

Yeah, I'm also a chemical engineer by trade. I've worked in consulting for about 10 years of my career doing a lot of industrial process design. So that's more putting together P and IDs, developing P and IDs, which is piping and instrumentation diagrams.

Okay.

Yep. Sizing equipment and so forth. But a lot like Matt, I wanted to get more into the sustainability and renewable sector and the kind of. I did a lot of wastewater in the consulting world, so the two kind of came together when I got this job here, and I absolutely love it. And so I am the process midstream engineer here, which means I essentially manage the pipeline injection system, which converts our biogas from our anaerobic digesters, which I'll get into later into renewable natural gas.

All right, great. Well, let's. Oh, yeah, we have the icebreaker question before we get into it too much. So the icebreaker question for both of you. What's one misconception about your job or your industry that you'd like to set straight to the. To the viewers or the listeners here?

Well, start. So amongst my friends, a lot of when they hear I'm an R and D scientist or engineer, misconception is that I'm in the lab all day with beakers, kind of mixing solutions the entire day, which isn't true. That's probably only about half of the day. So. But it is a lot of fun being kind of a professional researcher because there is a lot of in the lab time kind of tinkering and trying out new things where you're not entirely sure how it's going to work. Now, it's not like you see in the cartoons where one out of three times there's an explosion. So certainly that doesn't happen, but you're not really sure what the outcome is of the experiments. So that's kind of a lot of fun doing experimental research. Yeah. And. Yeah. So cool.

Well, would you set your friends straight? Whenever I tell my friends I work in wastewater, they invariably start talking about their toilets. Like, I got this leak on my toilet, my toilet's doing this. I'm like, they hear wastewater, they think toilets, and next thing I know, I'm talking about their toilets. So I don't tell many people, you know, how about you, Ryan? What's a misconception about you or your job.

Similar situation. Blair. When I tell people I work in wastewater, I usually get, you know, and the conversation ends. But I think, you know, people really don't know what really goes into wastewater. They don't understand the. The technologies, the innovation, the minds that, you know, all go into cleaning the water and what. The. What water resource recovery, you know, facility does and all the things that you can take out of the wastewater. Nutrients and renewable energy and so forth.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's part of the reason we started this Innovation Flow podcast to clue people into what parks going park's got going on and things that are happening at the plant. So hopefully you guys are helping the public and this podcast helping the public understand that wastewater is cooler than you might think it is.

Cool.

Yeah. All right, well, let's get into biogas. Catalytic methanation. And I know that part of this is the NREL project, but the NREL project is based on gas produced at South Platte Renew. So if you could just quickly, Brian, take us through where does this gas come from? How does it get to the end? How does it get treated or go through the process? And where does it. Where does it come from?

Yeah. So biogas is a byproduct of the anaerobic digestion process. And so in a wastewater facility, we remove all of the biosolids from the wastewater, and then we send all those biosolids to an anaerobic digester to get further treated. And in that digester, it undergoes various biological processes to create essentially an inert biosolid which can be used for land application. And then as part of that biological breakdown of those solids, you get what's called biogas. And it's a gas which is about 60% methane and 40% carbon dioxide. Traditionally, it's flared, but now we've identified the potential of, you know, this renewable source.

By flared, you mean just lit. Lit on fire.

Lit on fire, yeah.

Burns it and goes into the. Into the atmosphere.

Yep. It was at 60% methane. It's a combustible gas, so you can just flare it and it. You know, methane is a greenhouse gas, and it's like 25 times that of CO2. So that's why you flare it. So you can combust it into CO2. But what we do is we capture that and we clean it up and then we put it into a pipeline to be used and displace geological natural gas.

Cool. All right, well, then that brings us right to Matt. So the gas gets cleaned up, and then. Then tell us Your story, what are you, what are you doing with it, Matt?

Yeah, well, kind of at a high level, this biogas catalytic methanation process is built into a concept that they call power to gas. And so like Brian mentioned, Biogas generally has 60% methane or renewable natural gas, which is a good product that you want to use. And 40% of that gas is carbon dioxide. And it's just bent it to the atmosphere and not being used. And so, you know, kind of the motivation would be, would there be a way to utilize 100% of all of that biogas to make renewable natural gas? And so the reason it's called kind of power to gas is with the deployment of renewable electricity, there's two big challenges for decarbonization. So one of them is deployment of renewable electricity. But with the price of solar panels going down, wind turbines going down, there are times when there's just excess renewable electricity, more than the grid can handle. The idea is, is there a way to store that renewable electricity? So that's kind of a second component, the storage, and that's where this biogas comes in. And so the idea is to take this, this excess renewable electricity or the excess power and store that in a chemical form, which would be renewable natural gas with this methanation technology. Describing that a little bit, when there's extra electricity available, like wind and solar, you can power an electrolyzer. And so it takes water to make hydrogen. And hydrogen is a great fuel, but currently there's not really a market, or there's a market, but there's not a good way to utilize and distribute it. Yeah, but natural gas, I know at my house my water heater is natural gas, my stove's natural gas, and the majority of electricity in the United States is generated from natural gas. So there's hundreds of thousands of miles of distribution infrastructure. And so if we can take this renewable energy, turn it into natural gas, it's a good way to integrate with the hydrogen economy, to distribute a product and get near term decarbonization.

Cool.

Yeah.

All right, so that's big picture. Maybe can you dive in a little bit on how you would do this? You get the gas from Brian and you take it to your lab, and then how do you turn the CO2 into methane?

Yeah, sure. So there is.

Is it that simple? It sounds pretty simple.

It is. You know, it's just that, just that quick and easy. So, yeah. So this is, in this project, we're actually working with some researchers from University of Virginia. And Dave developed a special methanation catalyst. And I should give a shout out to Professor Xin Zhang. He's kind of the PI principal investigator on this project. He and his team have, you know, looked at a variety of methanation catalysts. And I can, but I won't initially get too deep into the science.

Thank you.

Looked at different properties of the metal particle size. So talking about really small to really, really, really small, and it changes, you know, on the order of 10nm to like 2nm, and depending on how large you make it, it affects the reactivity. But at any rate, I said I wouldn't go into the science.

Oh, but now are you talking nanoparticles? Now I'm excited. I've heard of those before.

But they're developing a catalyst that is an improvement on state of the art. But when we get the gas from Brian ships it over to nrel, we're able to run that through our reactors, load these catalysts developed by University of Virginia, and we test different process conditions to try to basically take a mixture of carbon dioxide, methane, add hydrogen to the reactor. We pass it over the reactor, we vary kind of the temperature, the pressure and the amount of hydrogen, how fast the gas is going through to change the residence time. And we look at what's coming out on the back end. Ideally, the only products on the back end would be methane or renewable natural gas and water, which is easily separated out. Depending on how you operate the reactor, of course, you get different performance. And then that ties into these process models to really holistically look at the energy consumption of the whole process.

Maybe. Can you describe just general. I'm asking a catalyst engineer, so maybe I'm setting myself up. But what is a catalyst? What does a catalyst do? What does that mean?

Sure. A catalyst is something that will so in the textbook fashion, enhance the rate of reaction. And it doesn't get used up itself. It just takes some reactants and they interact with the catalyst and make a product. But what it does well is. So in the case of, let's say, carbon dioxide and methane, you could put them in a tube, heat them up to some high temperature, and they might make some methane. But if you have a catalyst there, you can operate at a much lower temperature and that reaction can take place very quickly as compared to if there was no catalyst. So essentially, it makes things happen much faster and less energy input and cheaper than if it were absent.

Cool. Yeah, it's like a little bit of alchemy. It feels like, like turning something in the gold or something can you do that.

I'm working on it.

All right, back if you figure that one out, I'll have you back. Brian, what does all this mean for you here at South Plat Rainier? What does it mean to a wastewater plant if this carbon dioxide could be converted?

Yeah, it'd be massive impacts. So the traditional biogas upgrading systems use physical separation essentially. It takes the mixture of gases of carbon dioxide and methane, and the upgrade technology essentially separates those two molecules. Whether it's a membrane or pressure swing absorption system, you always have a waste gas of CO2. So if we were to be able to apply mass technology to the facility, we'd essentially increase. Increase our yield of renewable natural gas. So we take that carbon and the carbon dioxide and we'd actually convert that into more methane rather than, you know, admitting it to the atmosphere and wasting that. So if we would increase the yield, we'd increase our revenues. It would also increase the environmental stewardship of the facility as well. It would lower our. Lower the amount of CO2 we actually release in the air from that. So, yeah, it would be, it would be very impactful to the industry and supply revenue.

Cool. So you're, you're sustainable now, but this could allow you to go super sustainable. I mean, get even, even that 40% that currently you can't do anything with. Make it usable, huh? Yeah. Who thought of this?

Well, I mean, I guess the NREL team first approached Brian, but we weren't the first people to think about methanation of CO2. There are some, you know, there's examples, especially in Europe, about utilizing either both biogas sources or it could be other CO2 sources and converting. This goes back to the power to gas concept. But, you know, we thought, and I was actually reading just a Denver Post article about the work going on at South Platte Renew, creating pipeline injection, rng. And so I know it was already part of the mission to valorize the gas. And so I thought there might be a good opportunity to connect the dots between NREL's research on advanced new technologies and kind of partnering with Self Plat Renew to kind of, as you said, go super sustainable. Right. And even ways to enhance the technology, you know, enhance the decarbonization, let's say.

Cool. Well, I'm glad you were reading that article and put it all together. That's good. I want to get a little bit off topic now and we'll get back to the methanation project. But before that, I want to ask each of you, who's your science or inventor hero? And why do you like them? So who wants to go first, Matt? Brian, you want to go? Why don't you go first, Brian, your science inventor hero.

All right. You know, I, I didn't really have one, but I would say I had to do some googling. This guy named George Edward Davis, he is considered the father of chemical engineering. And the fact that I've dedicated four years of college and the rest of my career to this discipline, I think I have a lot to thank this guy for. He essentially, I guess he was a chemist. He was a French chemist for industrial process company. And he found out that there's really, it was hard to solve the problems in industrial chemistry application because it was so complex. So he essentially broke down the problem into smaller unit operations which are simpler systems, and then kind of went from there and it helped revolutionize the chemical industry. So cool. Yeah, thanks. George.

George. What was his last name?

George Edward Davis was his.

George Edward Davis. I have to remember that. All right, how about you, Matt? Who's your, who's your hero as far as science?

Well, I'll say. And you know, sticking with the Davis theme, I have another Davis, a, a scientist that I look up to. His name is Mark Davis and he's a well known researcher. He's a professor at Caltech and did a lot of work in zeolites, which is a class of catalysts and materials with a lot of really small pores. They're used a lot in the petrochemical industry to rearrange molecules. And he published a lot of great work in that area. And then he has kind of a little, I think a personal story. And his wife passed away sadly from cancer. And then I think he changed his research focus to be kind of oncology and drug delivery and has done phenomenal work in that area, has received a lot of awards. And I kind of remember kind of mid career when I was in grad school, he had kind of changed his research focus. And so someone was talking about Mark Davis, the cancer drug delivery researcher. I was like, wait, this is a totally different person than I was thinking about. I know Mark Davis who does delay. Like, no, that's the same person, but I find it really kind of a hero because one, I'm a catalyst guy. He has great work in catalysis, but also that if you're really motivated and bright and willing to take the courage to reinvent yourself, you can make outstanding contributions kind of in a totally different field.

Yeah, that's a good story.

And I should mention you might not know this Brian. But we have another Davis that works actually on this project. His name is Bob Davis. Happens also to be the brother of Mark Davis we were just talking about. So a lot of. Yeah, a lot of connections to the Davis.

Small world. Yeah. All right, well, thank you. Let's get back to the project a little bit. Question for you, Brian. Like the system set up to send gas back to the pipeline, right, The XL pipeline. How do you get it? What do you put it in? Container? What do you put it in? How do you get it there? Did you have to. What did you have to do to make this project work?

Yeah. So essentially what Matt's team needs is the actual biogas right before it's been converted to renewable natural gas. So we had to identify an area to extract the biogas from our system and place it into essentially compressed cylinders. And the challenge for us is just because we, we don't operate at the level of the pressures that Matt's team needs for their reactors. So we had to get a compressor that essentially boosts the gas from around 200 pounds per square inch all the way up to like 1200 pounds per square inch. And so we now have a very fancy compressor that we are going to be connecting into our system. And from there it's going to pull about 12 cubic feet per minute of gas and compress it into these cylinders up to 1200 psi. So from that, we'll be able to just deliver that to Matt where he can use it for his research.

How does that happen? You throw in the back here, your van, or how do you get it over there?

There are courier, like shipment companies that do that type of work, like Hazmat type, who can, who can ship compressed cylinders for you.

All right.

Yeah.

So then it arrives in your lab and, and you go to work. What have you, what have you learned through. Through this project when doing this, this lab analysis and through this project?

Yeah, it's, you know, there's. Being able to have like a real feedstock is, I think, critical when you're deployment, deploying technologies. And so there's always uncertainty about when you're. If you're using a real feedstock versus kind of some model idealized system that you're just mixing in the lab. And so we've learned that the composition that we're kind of modeling isn't always exactly what's coming out of the plant, that it's really important to remove impurities like hydrogen sulfide, siloxanes, volatile organic chemicals. So we've done some lab work there I know SPR has a commercial process to do that. And so, you know, kind of testing that, but also making sure there's not residual impurities is something we've learned. And I did, you know, I heard Brian mention with this new compressor that they're using to boost the biogas pressure to 1200 psi, that's not necessary for our process. And so, I mean, the 1200 psi is necessary to get the cylinders to us. But another thing we're learning is, you know, what really are the requirements for how high of a pressure do you need to go? And there are different stages in the process where you might pressurize it either early or later. And depending on how you do that, it results in kind of some differences in overall energy consumption.

All right, where's the project at? It's ongoing now. Right. How long will you be doing this research or do you know and when. How will you know when you, when you're done?

Well, it's. Yeah, we're kind of in the middle of the project now and Department of Energy will let us know when this phase is done. We're kind of the middle. We've already demonstrated 100 hours of operation with real biogas to make kind of pipeline compliant renewable natural gas. But it was with a very small amount of powdered catalyst. Think of like a bunch of grains of salt, something like that. But what we're hoping to do by the end of this project is to demonstrate it for longer. So 500 hours of a demonstration, but also with higher quantities of biogas and then with a catalyst that looks more like something that you would use in an industrial reactor. So we call this a technical catalyst or like a pelletized catalyst. So it's something that would look more like, I don't know, this, just like little pellets or like rabbit food or something like that, except to be made out of this nickel based cerium oxide aluminum material. So don't eat it, rabbits. But anyway, so we load that up in a reactor and could demonstrate this performance. And so hopefully that would go a long way to kind of showing the feasibility of a project like this for implementation. And we actually have an ongoing discussion about what could be the next stage of this project, which would be really working with an engineering design and construction firm to build out a pilot test unit that could be located hopefully on SPR grounds and kind of run this process continuously, integrate with an electrolyzer and so take it out of our labs and put some steel on the ground and have a demo unit that really integrates on site with a resource recovery facility.

Nice. So taking it from bench scale to more pilot scale at a facility. Yeah, that is great. Yeah, that's what we're hoping. Yeah, you're saying all the right things. Just what PARC is for, you know, developing ideas, doing pilot studies, research. So that's great. You kind of went into the technology impacts of this technology on the world, you know, the world besides wastewater. But can you, can you summarize what this science means to, you know, the world, I guess, outside of wastewater?

Sure. So I think globally. Right. There's a, you know, a huge emphasis and you know, perhaps moral responsibility, you'd say, to kind of have a sustainable, operate sustainably and this gives a really great near term and longer term avenue to harness renewable electricity and store it and then utilize it in a way where, you know, the public fluid doesn't have to change behavior that much. Right.

And so still have our gas stoves.

Still have our gas stoves. Right. And you know, there's always resistance to, you know, not only personal resistance to change, but also just like money, infrastructure, resistance to change. And so I think this technology has really good potential to get, you know, excess renewable electricity into homes, into the pipeline and, you know, facilitate this transition to a circular economy. And so I think this is, you know, a great project to be a part of and in a way that we can really be impactful in the near term.

Cool. How do you feel about that, Brian, to know that wastewater is part of research that could shape the whole global energy economy?

Yeah, that's why I love this industry. That's why I'm doing what I'm doing.

Yeah.

Yeah. I think it's fascinating and it's great to be part of.

Cool.

Yeah, it's exciting every day listening to Matt's presentations and the, the whole research team. I just, it, it's so interesting to me and to even just be kind of an outsider looking in, it's, it's a lot of fun.

Nice. Did you guys run into any hiccups along the way? Any, any good, any good stories there? Any cylinders fly off the car or anything like that?

Not yet, but when they do, we'll be sure to let you know. Yeah, I don't have any real hiccups to share.

That's good. That's good. When you're dealing with biogas, that's probably a good thing.

Exactly.

Right.

All right, well, thanks for, thanks for coming today. This has been interesting and thanks for sharing a little bit about your research with. What are they called?

Catalytics yeah, catalysts.

Catalysts. That's the word I was trying to come up with with catalysts and biogas and giving us the rundown. I appreciate it, Matt.

Yeah. Well, thank you so much. My pleasure.

And, Brian, thank you for breaking down the system and telling us how it all worked.

Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me.

We are not done yet, though. We have the end of show quiz. Oh, yeah. Are you ready? You guys can team this. You guys can. You can participate on a team. I have some book titles here, all right? And so you have to tell me whether they're real or they're fake. All right? I know real or fake book titles.

Okay, go for it.

All right, number one. Knitting with Dog Hair. Is that real or.

It's gotta be fake. That's gross.

You think fake?

I'm gonna go fake.

I'm thinking real.

Real.

I'm thinking real.

Okay, Matt, you are correct. It is a real book. It's donating with dog hair. Colon. Better a sweater from a dog you know and love than from a sheep you'll never meet.

Sure. But what if you're allergic to dogs like me?

I don't know. You have to read the book and see what they say. Okay, here's the next one. Big Uppins. How to Survive Life. Big Uppins. How to Survive Life. Is that real or fake?

That's. I gotta go fake. I don't even. I don't know what that means. I don't know what that means.

Okay.

I don't know what it means, but I am gonna go real.

You gonna go real?

Yeah.

No, Matt is right again. That's fake, too. My son came up with that this morning. Okay? I asked him, I said, what are uppings? And he was like, I don't know. I don't even know if it's a thing. All right, creative. Ready? Okay, you are ahead, Matt. Two to zero. Brian, you got two more, though. You can. Number three. Everything I know about women I learned from my tractor. Is that real?

Real.

I gotta go with real.

Okay, you're both correct.

That is real. And farmers seem pretty astute about their knowledge of women's.

Yeah, I want to read it. It's written by Roger Welsh, if anyone's interested. I'm gonna look it up. I don't know about that. I don't think so.

Gotta read it.

Okay, number four. And this is the last one. How to Avoid Huge Ships. Is that right or fake?

I would want to pick up a copy of that. And so I'm. I'm hopeful that it's real.

You're hopeful it's real.

Okay, Brian, I'm gonna have to go real too on that one.

You are both correct. It is real. It was written by a ship captain, John W. Trimmer. And I want to check it out because I'm like, what could it be about? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, I think Matt is the winner of our game. We'll have to get him some lovely prizes from the green room. But thanks again for being here. It's been great having you and maybe once this project goes to the next phase, we can have you back and talk about, talk about that.

Be fantastic. Yeah.

Well, thanks for being here and to our viewers and our listeners. If you're viewing on YouTube, go ahead, put some comments in the, in the chat. Let us know what you think of the program or if you got any ideas on topics that you'd like to hear or things you want to see on the show. If you're listening on Podcast Player, please give us a five star rating on Apple Podcasts if you like the show and tell your friends. I mean, we don't have a big advertising budget, so word of mouth is how we're getting the Innovation Flow Podcast out to people. So thanks for listening. If you have want to get a hold of us, the email is innovationflownglewoodco.gov that's how you can get a hold of me here at the podcast. And thanks for listening. We'll see you next time on the Innovation Flow Podcast. Ra.