Tokyo, Japan, Jan 13 – Toray Industries, Inc., announced today that it has made significant progress in a one-year trial with an all-carbon carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane separation membrane (see note 1) to remove carbon dioxide and moisture at the biogas (note 2) production facility of a customer’s sewage plant in Osaka Prefecture.
The company confirmed that moisture removal costs with this technology are around 70% (note 3) lower than those of existing technologies. Global energy shortages and the push to decarbonize have increased demand for more efficient CO2 separation. Toray develops all-carbon CO2/methane separation membranes that resist chemicals and separate gases. The company targets natural gas and biogas purification and CO2 capture from industrial exhaust. Biogas purification turns biogas into biomethane by removing impurities from gas made when waste and other feedstocks ferment.
Operators must remove moisture as well as CO2. But polymer and zeolite membranes in conventional systems break
down on exposure to moisture, so facilities must first dry the gas with adsorbents. That extra step raises costs and makes it hard to scale up methane purification.
Toray looks to apply this technology beyond biogas to include streamlining natural gas purification, CO2 separation and capture from industrial exhaust gases, and carbon dioxide capture, utilization and storage (note 4).
The company will showcase its technology at nano tech 2026 (https://www.nanotechexpo.jp/en/), which will be at Tokyo from Wednesday, January 28, through to Friday, January 30, 2026.
Toray will continue to pursue research and development in keeping with its commitment to delivering new value and contributing to social progress to help resolve global environmental, resource, and energy issues and contribute to a carbon-neutral and sustainable economy.
Part of the development work for its new technology was through a project funded by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization.