For the world to meet the goal of the 2015 Paris climate agreement to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” by mid-century, scientists say removing greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere will be essential. Dozens of companies have been created and billions of dollars spent already for carbon dioxide removal.  But another greenhouse gas getting a lot more attention for different reasons is methane. 

Methane is critical for many reasons.  The relative concentration of methane in the atmosphere has grown more than twice as fast as carbon dioxide since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Removing methane from the atmosphere could mean reducing future temperatures even faster than just removing carbon dioxide alone because methane is about 81 times more potent in terms of warming the climate in its initial 20 years after its release. Tackling methane emissions could also be one of the most cost-effective ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions for fossil fuel producers. And removing Methane pollution from the atmosphere would improve air quality by decreasing the concentration near ground-level ozone  which causes an estimated one million premature deaths every year from respiratory illnesses.

Dr.  Jessica Swanson, Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Utah, has focused her research endeavors on the emerging science of atmospheric methane capture.  Her research group – the Swanson Group – has decades of experience modeling enzymes central to bioenergetic transformations and developing kinetic models of complex processes. In this episode Dr. Swanson talks about what it’s like to work in this exciting and quickly growing research and development space. 

Listen to the Interview

 

---

Transcript

Ross Chambless
So first, Dr. Swanson, thanks so much for being here today.

Jessica Swanson
Yeah, absolutely. I’m happy to be here.

Ross Chambless
So just to start, I mean, I think a lot of people who listen to this show probably understand why methane is problematic in the atmosphere. But just to reiterate, because I think it’s important for context, why is methane, which like CO2, is a greenhouse gas, why is it a concern? Why is methane important to look at?

Jessica Swanson
Yeah, it’s an important question and it’s one that has been quickly evolving, I think, over the last few years I think people have always known that methane is kind of the second cousin to carbon dioxide, right. It contributes about a third of the warming that we’ve seen so far. But recently, people have recognized that if we have any chance of mitigating what’s called near-term warming, so what happens over the next decade, methane is really our handle to do that.

And the reason is it’s much more potent than carbon dioxide. So, depending on the timescale you’re looking at, if it’s 20 years, they say about 80-times, 100 years, maybe 34-times the number. They’ve settled on is about 43-times per molecule potency, in terms of how much it warms.  So, it’s more potent than carbon dioxide. It doesn’t have as long of a lifetime in the atmosphere, about 12 years. That’s variable depending on what’s going on with the atmosphere. But the goal right now is simply to get as much methane oxidized into carbon dioxide as possible, because by doing that, you have the potential of bringing down the near-term temperatures. And the hope there is that we don’t threaten as many tipping points, right. If we don’t go to high temperatures in the near-term, even if our goals long term, 2100 are the same. What happens in the near-term matters.

Ross Chambless
And then as I mentioned in the intro, you recently made a decision to really kind of retool or refocus your research, just focused on removing methane from the atmosphere. So, can you talk about what sort of spurred that decision?

Jessica Swanson
Yeah, it’s an interesting saga, I guess. You know, I’ve always cared about the environment. I went into biochemistry and biophysics both because I found it really interesting and because I had hoped long term I would be able to do something beneficial for the environment. And going through grad school, you know, that was always kind of my goal. And so, coming out of grad school, I dabbled a little bit with solar fuels, and I dabbled with batteries. But ultimately, you know, this area I had become so skilled in, which is using simulations and computers to characterize biological systems, the funding was health motivated, right? The funding giant was NIH. And so, I just kept getting pushed back into fundamental research that was somewhat health motivated. And it was always very interesting. And we’re still, pushing some method development and fundamental understanding in areas that I think are very important and interesting as well.

But I hit the point where was about two years ago I decided I cannot morally not work on climate. Right. It’s just too important. It’s too important to me. It’s too important to my kids. I can’t wake up every day and feel excited about what I’m going to do if it’s not going to have something to do with climate. And so, I started looking.

And I have to say it was it was a hard process. Like I had to look long and hard to find an area where the types of fundamental things that we do could have an impact. And what was, you know, both wonderful and surprising was that when I got exposed to this area of methane and started to learn about the challenges that people face and developing technologies that will work to mitigate methane, you know, it was kind of like the floodgates opened because I realized there are so many topics in biophysics that could be addressing this problem directly. I could, with the problems that my lab wants to work on now alone, I could fill the research labs of ten theorists easily. And twice as many experimentalists.

So, what was surprising was that the needs for fundamental science are there, right. What was lacking was basically a pathway for people who are doing this type of research to access them. And just the knowledge of what are the important questions, what types of problems should we be going after to have an impact in this area. And so that’s one of the things I’m trying to do now is that in all the talks I go to give is try and open up all these areas that people who work in biophysics could be contributing to problems like this.

Ross Chambless
I see. So now that you’ve kind of made that pivot, what areas are you focused on, specifically as far as like tackling this problem? How are you approaching the research and the problem?

Jessica Swanson
Right. So, there’s a there’s a handful of different technologies people are trying to develop to remove methane from the atmosphere at varying different concentration levels. What we are focusing on is the biological approach to that, which is using bacteria. Essentially, these methanotrophs, which naturally consume methane as their food, bio engineering them to be efficient enough to develop these bioreactors that can start to consume methane from various different point sources.

And ultimately our hope is, and this is what we got funding for, our hope is to get them efficient enough that they can actually consume at the dilute concentrations that are in the atmosphere, which is 2 PPM.  Now, I think it’s important to recognize that even if we are able to do that, the amount of air you have to treat to have an impact when you’re dealing with two parts per million, that’s PPM, is really a large amount of air.

So, you never know what kinds of amazing solutions are going to be in the future. And someday maybe we’ll have these little micro bioreactors on every building, you know, where you have ventilation running through and you’ll be creating some wonderful product from that. And we will be treating 2 PPM air.  In the near term, though, like very near term within the next five years, we’re hoping to get these bioreactors out into the field and developed enough that they’re treating the many, many point sources where it’s elevated, where it’s coming out of the ground.  And that’s what’s going to enable us to have an impact by 2030.

Ross Chambless
I see. So, this approach with the methanotrophs, as you as you describe, how does that process work? And it also seems to me that, my understanding of methane as a gas particle is it’s a lot more dispersed in the atmosphere. So, although it may be more concentrated in certain areas where there are emissions, for example, like factories or like a landfill or someplace like that, how does that process work and what are you learning about how it works?

Jessica Swanson
So, the methanotrophs are really amazing systems. I mean, these are definitely bacteria that are just consuming the methane as their food source. And they’re competing with what’s called methanogens. Those are the guys that are breaking everything down and they’re producing the methane in the first place. And the rub is that the methanogens don’t need oxygen, right? So, they can hang out in any anaerobic environment and produce as much methane as they want. So, anywhere where you have freshwater is standing water sources where oxygen is limited, these methanogens are hanging out, creating the methane.

The methanotrophs, they need oxygen. They use that oxygen to oxidize methane, right. So, they have to hang out in a layer above the methanogens where they can access both oxygen and the methane. And so net, overall, the methanogens are kind of winning. So, anywhere you have freshwaters, wetlands, these are sources of just constantly emitting methane.  Somewhat at low levels.

One of the scary things is that the recent projections of methane increasing, if you look at the chart, it’s really an interesting one. But over the recent years, it’s almost going exponential. It’s just increasing a lot, right. And they can track that by looking at the radio isotopes in the methane to see that most of the increases are from biological sources, not anthropogenic sources, not burning of fossil fuels, which is interesting.  And so, the current thought is, and they need to vet this and prove this, that there’s a positive feedback cycle. That the more the atmosphere warms, the more we have natural emissions. And so that’s a scary proposition. But one that I’m hopeful that all these wonderful technologies can help address.

So, that’s where methanotrophs sit. What are we doing with it? We use multi-scale simulations. Looking at things at the molecular level.  So, when you dig down to figure out what is it that’s limiting these methanotrophs, there are so many things that are potentially limiting it. There are so many layers of how you actually get the methane into the methanotroph. This is what people describe as mass transfer. That’s one of the limitations. As long as you can get more in there, they have more food, they’ll grow more efficiently, right. So, everything from the molecules that are excreted naturally from these methanotrophs to the surrounding aqueous or biofilm media, to the outer membrane and how they traffic methane across the outer membrane, to the periplasmic space, to the inner membrane, to how they hold oxidation complex and what they call these intracytoplasmic membranes. There are so many layers of this that could be improved if we knew how to improve their efficiency.

And so that’s what we’re digging into, is characterizing kind of each of these stages of the process to understand how could we tweak this, through bioengineering, to just increase that mass transfer a bit? Or, if the oxidation is limiting, how can we remove those limitations? If it’s reductant, how can we add in more reductant to increase overall efficiency of consuming methane?

Ross Chambless
Interesting. So, it sounds like it’s finding the right combination, as far as a cocktail of methanotrophs that would for function most efficiently?  And also finding the bioreactor that you mentioned, finding ways that can be most suitably positioned in areas where it would do the most good?

Jessica Swanson
Where is it going to be deployed? Yeah, so, for tangible goals, our hope is that we can improve the efficiency of the methanotrophs themselves about tenfold. And then on the bioreactor side, right. These used to be kind of trailer-sized things that contained some kind of liquid media and a bunch of microbes, right. Modern next generation bioreactors are going to be a thin film design where the methanotrophs are going on this biofilm on these thin film plates. And so more efficient in terms of exposing them to the air that’s containing the methane.

But even just a tenfold improvement in the methanotrophs, based on our calculations, would get these things to the point that they’re scalable and economically viable. So, one of the beautiful aspects of this particular approach to methane mitigation is it’s the only one that’s not just turning it into carbon dioxide, right. Because for every two molecules that these bugs consume, one will be turned into carbon dioxide. That’s natural metabolism. The other one though goes into biomass. And what you can do with those methanotrophs is you cultivate them. You pull them off and then you turn them into a product, okay.

And there’s lots of different potential products. The one we’re going to target to start with is just a single cell protein, right. Which could be used as a fish feed, a livestock feed. There’s lots of different uses. And then as a technology evolves, the hope is that we can create now consortium microbes where the methanotrophs are feeding these other microbes. And these other microbes can produce things like bioplastics and biofuels. And this is already being done. These consortia exist. They work right. It’s just a matter of getting all of these pieces of the puzzle together. And the part that we’re really hoping to contribute to is increasing that rate-limiting efficiency at the ground level. Because unless you do that, you’re kind of dead in the water, right.

And it’s just not a pie in the sky dream. I think we’re really pretty close. So, I’m pretty hopeful that within five years we’ll have these bioreactors out there.

Ross Chambless
Wow. And just curious about the process again, I mean, as far as energy required or input, does it require a lot of energy to get these bioreactors to function this way?

Jessica Swanson
Right. So you’d have to have energy to potentially, and this is the bioreactor side of things that I’m not as aware of, potentially manage any kind of liquid media that was put in there. Something to handle sloughing the bacteria off, although there’s a potential that if it’s designed right, they would naturally slough off.  If they’re in a cold weather environment you might have to have something that keeps them at a reasonable temperature so they don’t freeze, right. They keep growing. But all in all, those are pretty simple energy needs. Right.

And so that’s one of the benefits of methanotrophs. And this is typical biology, right. These are basically catalysts that work at room temperature. And so many of the other bioreactor technologies that are people are trying to develop are thermal catalysts where you need a lot of heat or photocatalyst, where you need enough photons. And both of those are the essential part is getting over the reaction barrier, converting methane into carbon dioxide, right. And this is a downhill process, which is probably why people would think, why are we doing this? Methane is a valuable molecule. This is natural gas. We burn it, right? We use it for energy. Why would we just randomly convert it into carbon dioxide? And why is that even hard? We burn it all the time.

Well, the reason the flame is essential is because there’s a barrier to get over this reaction. So, biology is phenomenal at creating these catalysts that are just really good, better than the catalysts that we’re able to make. And so, the key catalysts in the methanotrophs is called particulate methane monooxygenase and that functions at room temperature.

So, kind of a side goal of all of our work is to understand how can we retain the activity of that enzyme outside of the methanotrophs. And that has potential applications in all kinds of technologies, like putting these enzymes onto electrodes and electrocatalytically converting methane into methanol and vice versa. If you could get the enzyme stable and still active outside of the methanotroph, you could do that. And increasingly, these types of enzymes are used in technology and in manufacturing. So, it can be done.

Ross Chambless
Interesting. So, I understand you recently attended a national conference related to atmospheric methane removal. I’m sure you were able to meet others working in this space and get a feel for the other approaches which you mentioned. I’m just curious what you learned about who else is working on this problem, and what was your general take away?

Jessica Swanson
Yeah, that was a great experience. So, it’s the National Academy of Sciences that’s running a workshop right now on the research needs and the needed agenda for advancing our abilities to treat methane from the atmosphere. And it’s really a tremendous community that’s coming together around the topic of methane because it’s not as large as carbon dioxide. It’s still a manageable community and people are really trying to work together to see how we can collectively advance all of these solutions. And they’re trying to figure out, you know, which of these is going to be a really viable path forward? Which of these can we push and have an impact? And I think collectively you get the sense that this is just an amazing group of people, that everyone they’re not in it for themselves, right. They’re in it because they want to have an impact. So, it’s a very interactive and supportive group. And it was a great experience.

Ross Chambless
And so, I guess the approach that you’re taking that you mentioned, are there other peers that are taking similar approaches as far as using methanotrophs? You gave kind of a list already…

Jessica Swanson
Yeah, so I mean, I am by no means the leader in this area. Our main collaborator is Mary Lidstrom, who’s at University of Washington, and she is one of the many gods of methanotrophs. She knows them inside and out. Her entire career has been on methanotrophs. And over that time, she’s been able to develop a strain that is better at consuming at low methane concentrations than any other, okay. And so, she’s really kind of the thought leader behind the methanotroph side.

What my group brings to it, and we’re working with many others, but what my group brings to it is kind of this new perspective of thinking about the challenges that we face from a very molecular biophysical focus, right. And which any time you bring disciplines together, you get a lot more creativity and advances in thinking about how to solve a problem. So, it’s very fun in that sense. We’re also working with Amy Rosenzweig. She’s also phenomenal. She’s at Northwestern University. And she is, I would say, one of the gods goddesses of the particulate methane monooxygenase. So, she’s gotten the structures of the system. She knows the system really well.

So, it’s a great team. And there are many other people working in methanotrophs. The issue for some time has been funding, right. Which is why I was really so happy to see this workshop being run because that is hopefully what will bring the attention of the legislature towards, hey, we need to put some money into this.  Because the only way we’re going to make fast advances is if we can bring all of the phenomenal people who can do the science together and focus them. And you can’t, no matter how much one individual wants to or even a few, you can’t do that without funding, right. Because everyone’s just got limited time in their day.

Ross Chambless
Absolutely. What does the outlook look like on that front as far as federal level funding, or perhaps private, or even state level?

Jessica Swanson
It’s a great question. Yeah. And hopefully is changing.  It’s been sparse over the last, I don’t know how long, forever? But the attention is increasing around methane. So, there’s kind of a movement afoot that that there should be more funding coming from NSF, DOE, ARPA-E.   they’ve had a program for a long time looking at methane emissions, but it’s been limited to emissions treating energy-related emissions. So, the attention is growing. I’m hopeful that that the funding will be coming out quickly.

And actually, I should say that what got us really going on this is we got some funding from this Carbon Technology Research Foundation, a wonderful nonprofit group in the UK, that they put out a call for people using bioengineering to bring carbon out of the atmosphere, using natural sources. And they were really looking for technologies that would focus on carbon dioxide. I think methane was kind of put in there at the very end. But we were one of the first three funded groups out of that. So that’s very exciting. So that’s more on the nonprofit side.

Ross Chambless
Okay. Interesting. And just out of curiosity, to pivot back to the kind of the research side of things, would you say there’s any sort of like risks involved with this kind of research? Because, you know, methane we know methane is flammable, right. And as far as when you’re doing laboratory work, are the risks on that front? And as far as just other more broad theoretical, perhaps, could there be unintended consequences of removing lots of methane from the atmosphere?

Jessica Swanson
Right. And that’s one of the key things to keep an eye on. And it’s more of a challenge for some of these other technologies that that are coming out. One in particular that I’m hopeful for, I can explain if you would like. But for the methanotrophs, yes and no. The no side is that as long as you have a closed system where you just have the methanotrophs, you have kind of a lot of control over what’s being produced in there, right. So, there’s not a lot of real dangers that come along with that. These are pretty benign bacteria. They’re all over in all the soils around us. So, that’s reasonably safe Part.

What becomes tricky is when you go to open systems or you go to a consortium, what they have seen is that when you stimulate methanotrophs and you can do this by just spreading a little bit of copper, because copper is the metal that they use, you spread a little copper in the ground and you will stimulate methanotrophs. But the problem is that by doing that, you starve out the bacteria that are reducing nitrous oxide. And so, you actually end up increasing the emissions of nitrous oxide. And so, it’s been a very important part of the community over the last year is getting that information out there to make sure that everybody who’s doing this kind of thing is paying attention to whether or not they’re also producing nitrous oxide. Because it’s even more potent than methane, right. So, you don’t want to do that.

So, I think people are more cognizant of that. And I think that those will be kind of the challenges going forward with the biologically based solutions.

Ross Chambless
And as far as like on the other side of things, like the potential co-benefits that might occur with methane atmospheric reduction, as far as you know, economic, ecological, social, who knows?

Jessica Swanson
Yeah. So, that’s also one of the things that gets me excited about the biological solution is that that there are some potential co-benefits that I think could be really wonderful, right.

So, if you can develop these bioreactors such that they are taking air out of places like coal mines, right. Which are communities that are struggling to deal with their issues. And they are turning it into this green product, whether it’s a fish protein or a livestock protein or something else. Now you’ve created a green business for these communities that that need some alternative to these coal mines that are sitting around and need to be dealt with. right.

Same thing for marginalized communities that are losing their access to fish. Their main food, right. So, if you could create a business model for them where they could be both taking methane away from either the air or local sources, and producing fish feed to now harvest more fish, grow more fish, you know, it’d be kind of a win-win.

So, just that you’re creating a product is unique within the methane space, right.  And so, the hope is that we can get that to the point that this is something that will be market driven eventually. The other approaches… I’m pushing for everything, because we need everything, but there’s no product right to drive them. So, it makes the financial model a little more complicated, right.

Ross Chambless 
Right. So, when you kind of step back and look at the state of this emerging space, it seems like there are a lot of good ideas for potential entrepreneurism or, economic products that could benefit from this?

Jessica Swanson
Yeah. So that will play at least a part in the biological space. And then, you know, this is an area that gives me hope. You know, climate change can be daunting sometimes, and I think that there are a lot of potential solutions.

They are still, you know, the community still coming together around it. But there’s a lot of potential there. I mean, there’s people who are looking at these bacteria in trees and they found some trees absorb a lot more methane than others. So, what’s going on with those consortia? Can we replicate them so that we have trees that are consuming methane more efficiently? They’re looking at it in leaves, they’re looking at soil sources. You know, there’s just a lot of ways that the different approaches may be synergistic and contribute collectively to bringing down methane levels.

Ross Chambless
And as far as looking at more like the policy making side of things, which I think is important to consider, what would you say are things that if you had the opportunity to talk to policymakers, whether at the federal level or the state level, or even more local levels, what areas might you say are important to look at as far as supporting this just kind of work?

Jessica Swanson
Yeah, the political side is very important. There was this group called Methane Action that was in operation for a while. That was really focusing on the political side of this. I’m obviously, you know, I’m not on the policy side, so I’m not an expert. But I would say the obvious factors are that we need to put in some kind of limitations on emissions of methane. Ideally, we put a kind of a cost associated with that. So, companies are releasing more than X amount. You know, they’re charged a bit, right.  So, this has been kind of in progress. The more that that gets out there, the more we have funding to drive solutions, right. And that’s critical. So, the more that we can add a dollar value to methane mitigation, that will be very helpful.

And the other thing is just the importance of supporting these areas. So, bringing funding to the research that’s going to support their technology.  And to be honest, we can’t do this without the private sector involvement. So, we need the policy in place, and we need the people on that in the market side. And the nonprofit side pushing it as well.

Ross Chambless
How do you feel like your work here is supported generally by university community and other researchers?

Jessica Swanson
So, this national meeting was a big step forward. And I think things like this are a big step forward. You know, anybody that I talk to in terms of my colleagues as students, they all get excited about this work. That’s great. But I don’t feel as integrated with the rest of the things that are going on campus yet. And I’m hoping that can grow over time, right.

One of my one of my goals is to create a course actually at the undergraduate level that would focus on climate solutions. And through that course, I was hoping to integrate a lot more of the researchers and other areas. And, you know, even the Wilkes Center on things at the Wilkes Center is doing to build more of a community, at least that that I can contribute to. So, I’m so grateful for the Wilkes Center, to be honest. You know, this is a great addition to the university. And I’m just yeah, I’m hoping to get more integrated to all of the options that are going on in campus.

Ross Chambless
Excellent. I guess just one last question, what do you do when you’re not in the lab? What do you do for enjoyment when you’re not hard at work with research?

Jessica Swanson
Yeah, being on the tenure track is an intense period. But I do have two kids. I have an eight and a ten-year-old and so I have a lot of fun spending time with them, of course. My husband got me into triathlons of all things, and so I’ve always been an athlete. I used to be a rock climber and a soccer player. And so that’s been something that’s been nice to keep my head a little bit straight, you know, when that intensity at work is too high. And so, I tried my last half Ironman last summer, and that was a challenge. And I’m hoping to try another one this coming summer.

Ross Chambless
Great. Well, Dr. Jessica Swanson, thank you so much for spending this time to talk.

Jessica Swanson
Yeah. Thank you for having me.

Related Articles