The opportunity

The removal of methane from our atmosphere is recognised as vital to mitigating near-term warming, avoiding tipping points, and enabling long-term climate goals. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas. It accounts for approximately 30% of current warming, with a warming potential 34 times greater than CO₂ over a 100-year timeframe and 86 times more potent on a shorter 20 year timescale. Developing a scalable technology that could efficiently remove methane would transform our ability to slow global warming both by 2050 and in future decades.

“Methane is 34 times more potent in its warming effects than CO₂ on a 100 year timescale and 86 times more potent on a shorter 20 year timescale.

What if we could remove enough methane from the air by 2050 to meaningfully contribute to vital global warming targets?

In nature, there are bacteria that already remove methane but this happens slowly. We aim to capitalise on these common biological processes meaning that as scientists we don’t need to start from scratch and already have access to the intelligence that could allow us to engineer solutions that are scalable globally”

Dr Mary Lidstrom – Professor Emeritus of Chemical Engineering and Professor Emeritus of Microbiology University of Washington, Seattle

Mary Lidstrom – Professor Emeritus of Chemical Engineering and Professor Emeritus of Microbiology University of Washington, Seattle

The science

Methanotrophic bacteria are nature’s methane eaters. This project is engineering methanotrophic strains by combining state-of-the-art bioengineering with computational modelling and simulation. The aim is to boost nature’s solution to remove methane from the atmosphere with at least a 10-fold enhanced consumption rate at concentration levels found in the air at targeted locations (near-ambient concentrations).

Scalability and implementation would be unlocked through the combination of these developed strains with the development of thin film bioreactors (industrial reaction chambers), allowing the targeting of methane removal from ambient air in areas of high concentration, for example wetlands or tundra where permafrost melting causes the release of methane.

Importantly this project is low risk in terms of wider environmental impacts due to the controlled and contained environment proposed for the engineered bacteria.

This stands in contrast to many other proposed technologies which despite targeting the reduction of methane emissions, have the potential to increase atmospheric levels of nitrous oxide (N₂O), a greenhouse gas 10 times more potent even than methane.

The potential impact

Ultimately, the research team envisions widespread deployment, with methanotrophic methane consumption technologies helping to restore atmospheric methane to pre-industrial levels. The minimum long term project target is 0.3 Gigatons of cumulative methane capture by 2050, which is predicted to avert 0.1-0.22⁰C of global temperature increase, providing significant impact. With funding support, the pace of reaching this target could be accelerated, assisting the team in reaching proof of concept and in turn scale up sooner.

A significant co-benefit of the biomass generated by these bacteria would be a sustainable single cell protein source for aquaculture and livestock food, decreasing our reliance on land and carbon intensive alternatives. Methane-derived single cell protein has been used for this purpose for over a decade and has been estimated to have a value of USD 1600 per ton. It involves harvesting the methane-grown cells periodically and drying them, but no further processing is required.

Scalability and implementation would be unlocked through the combination of these developed strains with the development of thin film bioreactors (industrial reaction chambers), allowing the targeting of methane removal from ambient air in areas of high concentration, for example wetlands or tundra where permafrost melting causes the release of methane.

Importantly this project is low risk in terms of wider environmental impacts due to the controlled and contained environment proposed for the engineered bacteria.

This stands in contrast to many other proposed technologies which despite targeting the reduction of methane emissions, have the potential to increase atmospheric levels of nitrous oxide (N₂O), a greenhouse gas 10 times more potent even than methane.

The research team

An interdisciplinary team of the world’s leading research scientists from three of the best universities in the US will build on decades of experience cultivating the most efficient methanotrophic strain known to date.

Dr Mary Lidstrom – Professor Emeritus of Chemical Engineering and Professor Emeritus of Microbiology University of Washington, Seattle

Dr. Mary Lidstrom, the team lead, is Professor Emeritus of Chemical Engineering and Professor Emeritus of Microbiology at the University of Washington. She is an acknowledged leader in the methanotroph field globally, where she has been active for 50 years and is now committing her life’s work to this project. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Jessica Swanson - Assistant Professor, University of Utah, Department of Chemistry and the Henry Eyring Center for Theoretical Chemistry

Dr. Jessica Swanson is Assistant Professor, University of Utah, Department of Chemistry and the Henry Eyring Center for Theoretical Chemistry. Her group has over a decade of experience modelling enzymes central to bioenergetic transformations, developing kinetic models of complex processes and characterising membrane interactions with proteins and small molecules, with extensive experience developing and using reactive molecular dynamics approaches to characterise proton transport in systems like cytochrome c oxidase. She is refocusing her career and her team on biological methane mitigation.

Dr. Amy Rosenzweig - Professor of Molecular Biosciences and Chemistry, Northwestern University

Dr. Amy Rosenzweig is Professor of Molecular Biosciences and Chemistry, Northwestern University. She has studied methanotrophs and methane monooxygenases (MMOs) for 35 years. Widely regarded as a world expert on pMMO, she has made major contributions to understanding its structure and biochemistry. She is a MacArthur Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

“The incredible thing about this work is the enormous potential to scale up.

We are currently working on adapting bacteria to remove methane in areas of relatively high concentration (500-1000 parts per million). Our grand challenge is to go after the methane in the air that we’re breathing. At 10 parts per million the number of sites this solution could be deployed at goes up significantly and that’s incredibly exciting.”

Dr Mary Lidstrom – Professor Emeritus of Chemical Engineering and Professor Emeritus of Microbiology University of Washington, Seattle

Mary Lidstrom – Professor Emeritus of Chemical Engineering and Professor Emeritus of Microbiology University of Washington, Seattle

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