Summary and concept

The challenge of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions is that they are either produced outside in open air or, when produced indoors, diluted in high amount of ventilation air. This makes them technically difficult to tackle. The concentration of methane in the indoor air of a cattle barn is in the range of tens to hundreds of parts per million (ppm). Therefore, neither commercial utilization of methane nor the direct thermal combustion is feasible.

Currently there is no suitable way to treat dilute methane in animal barns. In order to reduce methane emissions quickly and reach the carbon neutrality by 2035, the new technical solutions must be efficient, have high potential for fast commercialization, and have investment and operation costs that are affordable for the farmers. This is the primary target of the CANMILK project.

The ambitious goal of CANMILK is to develop novel technology for methane conversion to CO₂ which is less harmful compound with 28 times lower global warming potential than methane. Non-thermal plasma, a.k.a cold plasma, is today in everyday consumer use for example in fluorescent lamps and in ozone generators. The CANMILK project converts this technology to an innovative high-tech and low-cost solution to fight against ppm level methane emissions.