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Recent breakthroughs in developing methane pyrolysis are a sign the fuel will have a role in decarbonising industry

Technology breakthroughs boost green hydrogen

It has been a difficult year for the hydrogen industry with disappointing customer demand and a pullback in government support causing some companies to pause high-profile investments.

But in a sign that the fuel will have a role to play in decarbonising industry, ExxonMobil and BASF signed a deal this week to collaborate on developing methane pyrolysis, an emerging technology that produces low-emissions hydrogen.

The companies plan to build a demonstration plant in Baytown, Texas, to develop methane pyrolysis at scale, said Mike Zamora, president of Exxon’s technology and engineering group, in a blog post.

“Methane pyrolysis holds real potential, especially in regions where traditional carbon capture and storage solutions are less viable. ExxonMobil brings decades of deep technical knowledge in methane pyrolysis and a shared commitment to innovation.” 

Stephan Kothrade, BASF’s chief technology officer, said the German company had worked for more than a decade on the technology and successfully developed a “superior reactor concept” that had already been validated at its test plant in Ludwigshafen, Germany.

“By combining BASF’s process innovation with ExxonMobil’s scale-up expertise we are bringing this cost-efficient low-emission hydrogen solution closer to economically viable industrial deployment,” he said.

Methane pyrolysis works by heating natural gas or other gases, such as biomethane, in an oxygen-free environment to convert it into hydrogen and solid carbon. The hydrogen can be sold as an emissions-free fuel while the solid carbon produced via the process has applications for companies making battery materials, aluminium, steel and other products. 

The technology offers some advantages over steam-methane reforming technology, which is the standard process for making hydrogen in the US.

The methane pyrolysis process does not generate CO₂ emissions, which makes it a potentially powerful decarbonisation tool. In contrast, SMR technologies produce about 10 tons of CO₂ for every ton of hydrogen made, when no carbon capture technology is deployed.

Methane pyrolysis will also compete with water electrolysis, a process that is being pursued by companies seeking to use renewable energy to make so-called green hydrogen. Methane pyrolysis uses about seven times less electricity than electrolysis and no water, according to research.

One additional benefit to developing methane pyrolysis is that companies can leverage existing natural gas infrastructure, such as pipelines and refineries, which could reduce the cost of deployment. Low natural gas prices in the US due to the shale revolution make the country an attractive location to develop the technology, say analysts.

Doug Vine, director of energy analysis at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, said scaling methane pyrolysis had proved challenging to date due to costs associated with the large amounts of energy required.

But he said there was growing excitement about the number of start-ups developing new catalysts for the process that boost efficiency and the participation of industrial giants, such as Exxon and BASF, which have the muscle to scale the technology.    

“Some of the breakthroughs have been fairly recent in terms of identifying catalysts that can reduce the temperature, and therefore the energy needed to make the reaction happen,” Vine said.

He said the dual revenue stream created by the process, and the drive for decarbonisation, made the technology compelling. “It’s often not the hydrogen that’s the valuable commodity. It’s the solid carbon.”

The solid carbon, which is often called carbon black, is used to make tyres, asphalt, plastics and battery materials. It is typically produced through a “furnace process”, which burns heavy hydrocarbon oils. This generates about 2.3 tons of CO₂ per ton of carbon black.

But a growing number of companies are seeking to commercialise methane pyrolysis as a low-carbon alternative.

Molten Industries, a start-up founded in a garage by Stanford University graduates Caleb Boyd and Kevin Bush in 2021, is developing technology that uses high-temperature methane pyrolysis powered by renewable electricity to make battery-grade graphite and clean hydrogen.

“We use electrical resistive heating similar to a toaster [in our reactor] . . . we inject natural gas into that reactor and heat it using electricity and heating like a toaster, and it splits into graphite and hydrogen,” Boyd told Energy Source.

“The really unique thing is that we’re able to control the parameters of that reaction such that we form graphite directly in the process. And then those graphite flakes that come out, it honestly looks like black glitter. It’s very beautiful,” said Boyd, who has a PhD in materials science.

Monolith, a company backed by investors including Warburg Pincus, TPG Rise Climate and Decarbonization Partners, a joint venture between BlackRock and Temasek, is developing a commercial scale plasma pyrolysis process in Nebraska to produce carbon black.

The company signed a collaboration agreement with the global tyre manufacturer Goodyear in 2021, and its solid carbon products have already been embedded in more than 1mn tyres.

But in a sign of the obstacles start-ups face developing emerging technologies in the decarbonisation sector, Monolith has faced funding challenges and project delays. Earlier this year it paused its application for a $1bn conditional loan agreed in 2021 with the US Department of Energy, which has frozen billions of dollars in loans since Trump was inaugurated.

Monolith is raising fresh capital and has scaled back its expansion plans.

With dreams of permanent franchises in Europe, the league has quietly been keeping tabs on companies aiming to bring the technology back—and it could happen sooner than you think

Late last January, just a couple of weeks before the Eagles toppled the Chiefs in the Super Bowl inside a packed Superdome, a small crowd of observers gathered to witness an event with even greater significance for the future of the NFL.

On a crisp morning in California’s Mojave Desert, the skies cleared just enough for a jet to take off—and go supersonic.

The test flight of a plane called XB-1, developed by the company Boom Supersonic, became the first civilian jet to break the sound barrier since the Concorde. This was of particular interest to NFL executives who have spent recent years quietly monitoring the progress of Boom and other companies in this space, according to people familiar with the matter.

They knew that the return of supersonic travel could help make the league’s wildest fantasies come true.

Until now, the prospect of placing an NFL team—or perhaps an entire division—across the Atlantic had faced the seemingly insurmountable logistical hurdle of travel times. But cut those times roughly in half and that obstacle all but disappears: a supersonic flight from New York to London would take under four hours.

The idea of permanent NFL teams based in Europe in the next decade or so might seem far-fetched, but the league’s overseas ambitions have only intensified in recent years. London is now a mainstay on the calendar, and this season has seen the NFL make debuts in Dublin, Berlin and Madrid.

While the NFL doesn’t have firm plans to place any teams abroad or a concrete timeline, league officials have been keeping a close eye on the momentum behind commercial supersonic flights. Blake Scholl, the chief executive of Boom Supersonic, says he “shouldn’t comment on private discussions” with the NFL, but he believes it’s only a matter of time until the technology transforms America’s biggest sports leagues into truly global operations.

“It’s inevitable,” Scholl says. “The only reason they aren’t already is the speed of travel.”

Back when the Concorde zipped back and forth across the Atlantic, from 1976 to 2003, commercial supersonic travel was a daily reality. But rising costs and a disastrous Air France crash outside Paris in 2000 grounded the plane for good.

Now, Boom Supersonic is just one of the companies aiming to bring it back. It says it already has 130 preorders, including from several major airlines, with a goal of carrying its first passengers in its yet-to-be-completed commercial jet by 2029. Known as Overture, the aircraft is designed to cruise at Mach 1.7 on transoceanic routes, or twice as fast as today’s airliners. It also aims to go about 50% quicker over land.

The prospects for the return of commercial supersonic flight have also been improved by changes to regulatory restrictions. In June, President Trump signed an executive order directing the Federal Aviation Administration to repeal a half-century old ban on supersonic flight over U.S. land, contingent on reductions in sound.

“Advances in aerospace engineering, materials science, and noise reduction,” the order said, “now make supersonic flight not just possible, but safe, sustainable, and commercially viable.”

If supersonic travel is ultimately the tailwind that brings the NFL to Europe, it wouldn’t be the first time that evolutions in travel technology have spurred sports expansion. In Major League Baseball, the Dodgers and Giants only moved from New York to Los Angeles and San Francisco, respectively, after transcontinental flights became available and teams were no longer limited by rail times.

People familiar with the NFL’s thinking say that the concept of European expansion isn’t a front-burner issue right now. But the league remains intrigued by the potential return of supersonic travel by the end of the decade.

The NFL has to consider several other factors when it comes to placing teams in Europe, but meaningfully accelerating the travel time would be a significant one, the people said. Still, it isn’t just about finding speedy planes—they would also have to comfortably accommodate NFL traveling parties of around 200 people. The Overture is planned to carry only 60 to 80 people.

But even without permanent teams abroad, supersonic travel would make the NFL’s current international schedule smoother for the clubs hitting the road.

This season, for instance, the Los Angeles Rams adopted a highly unusual schedule to navigate the logistics of a game in Baltimore followed by another in London. After taking on the Ravens, they spent a week in Maryland and practiced at the Orioles’ ballpark before flying across the Atlantic the following Friday night to take on the Jaguars.

That’s nothing compared with what the Rams will deal with next season when they are slated to appear in the NFL’s first game in Australia as part of the league’s ever-expanding footprint. League officials have expressed a desire to play even more games abroad in the years to come, which not only grows the NFL’s popularity but also cultivates new potential time slots to drive up the value of media rights.

The technology that could help unlock all of that on the widest possible scale is still years away. It’s also arriving faster than you might realize.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is “behind schedule” preparing its Starship launch vehicle for a U.S. mission to the Moon, so NASA is seeking alternative bids from other companies including Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, the space agency’s head said Monday.

NASA acting administrator Sean Duffy made the comments in reference to the space agency’s Artemis III mission to the moon, which aims to be the first human landing on the moon since 1972. NASA selected SpaceX in 2021 for the mission, which is due to launch in 2027.

“They are behind schedule, and so the President wants to make sure we beat the Chinese,” Duffy said on Fox News in reference to SpaceX. “I’m in the process of opening that contract up. I think we’ll see companies like Blue [Origin] get involved, and maybe others. We’re going to have a space race in regard to American companies competing to see who can actually get us back to the moon first.” Musk and President Donald Trump, once close allies, had a falling-out over the summer before publicly reuniting in September. Bezos and Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp have both met with Trump.

Nvidia said Wednesday it had struck deals to rent $26 billion of servers from cloud providers over the next six years, doubling the cloud spending commitments it disclosed just three months ago.

The cloud spending plan implies Nvidia will rent several hundred thousand of its own graphics processing units from cloud providers like Amazon and Google that purchase them. Nvidia said in a regulatory filing that it will pay $1 billion to rent servers in the current fiscal year, $6 billion in both 2027 and 2028, $5 billion in 2029, and $4 billion in both 2030 and 2031. That will make Nvidia one of the world’s biggest cloud spenders and users of GPUs.

Nvidia said it might not use all of the capacity. Nvidia said some of its commitments “may be reduced, terminated or sold to others” by the cloud providers from which it rents servers.

Nvidia’s spending commitment increased even though it has stepped back from its nascent cloud computing business known as DGX Cloud, which aimed to rent out GPUs to business customers. These days, Nvidia uses most of the DGX Cloud server capacity for its own internal efforts, The Information has reported. Earlier this summer, Nvidia launched another kind of cloud service, DGX Cloud Lepton, which helps businesses rent GPUs from various cloud providers.

Nvidia’s cloud commitments includes its agreement to rent 10,000 of its AI chips back from cloud startup Lambda, The Information first reported. Nvidia also rents its chips from CoreWeave and major cloud providers including Oracle and Amazon.

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