Key EV Battery Material Can Come From a Surprising Source: Methane

[Meredith Poor + 895]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-06-20/california-startup-creates-key-electric-vehicle-battery-material-from-methane?srnd=homepage-americas&sref=RzXyyOXY

Quote

Oakland-based startup Molten Industries is working to build it by relying on something that’s cheap and abundant in the US: natural gas. The company has developed a specialized technique to break methane into graphite and hydrogen, the latter of which can be used as a source of clean energy. The effort is funded in part by a $25 million Series A financing round led by Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV).

A lot of methane is 'biogenic', and a lot of it is produced in landfills and feedlots. The article goes on to indicate that the process uses pyrolysis, which could easily be driven, at least in part, by concentrated solar. If demand for graphite dries up, there is nothing wrong with dumping it back in the mines from which it was extracted, or storing it in defunct coal mines.