• Question: what happens when you mix carbon dioxide with methane?

    Asked by lupopippa to Davie, Gemma, James P, James V, Nuala on 25 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: James Verdon

      James Verdon answered on 25 Jun 2012:

      I’m not really sure. However, carbon dioxide (CO2) is not very reactive, so you’d probably just have a mix of CO2 and methane. There are small amounts of both CO2 and methane that are always present in the atmosphere, and they don’t appear to react with each other.

      What you want to do is to mix methane with oxygen, because the methane will burn in the oxygen, creating an explosion. If you use bunsen burners, this is what they are. The natural gas (which is methane) comes through the gas tap, and burns in the oxygen present in the air, creating the flames.

      Your teachers probably won’t appreciate me saying this, but I always used to love messing about with bunsen burners during chemistry classes at school…..

    • Photo: James Pope

      James Pope answered on 25 Jun 2012:

      Hi lupopippa,

      Like James V I don’t think you can mix Carbon Dioxide and Methane. However I do know that these two are both important greenhouse gases that have a big affect on our climate and how warm it will get because of climate change, so we need to limit how much of both of these two gases we allow to be emitted into the atmosphere!

    • Photo: Gemma Purser

      Gemma Purser answered on 25 Jun 2012:

      In the lab at the moment I have a big cylinder full of carbon dioxide and methane mixed together that ive been using to put in an experiment. They are both a gas at room temperture and atmospheric pressure. They dont react together and just sit in my cylinder quite happily. However if you squash this mixture under high pressures then there will become a point where the gas turns into a liquid, this is just after the ‘critical point’. The critical point for methane occurs at lower temperture and pressure than carbon dioxide so if you squashed them both at the critical point for methane it would be as a liquid but carbon dioxide would be a gas. This type of information is important if you wanted to transport them both in a pipeline to a storage site to carry out carbon capture and storage (CCS).

      If you want to know what happens to the rocks if you mix carbon dioxide with methane underground then I will be able to tell you in a few months time when the experiments are finished and ive plotted up the data in a graph! so i guess all i can say is watch this space…………..

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