Modular Production of Liquid Fuels and Chemicals from Biogas

Funding Opportunity: USDA SBIR phase I (USDA-NIFA-SBIR-009962) Topic: 8.8 Biofuels and Biobased Products Company: Advanced Energy Materials LLC (ADEM) Project Title: "Modular Production of Liquid Fuels and Chemicals from Biogas" Principal Investigator: Praveen Meduri PROJECT SUMMARY Advanced Energy Materials LLC proposes to demonstrate the production of methanol from biogas. ADEM will study the feasibility of its catalyst and the process for conversion of biogas to syngas and further reforming of syngas to methanol. Ultimately ADEM plans to demonstrate an economically viable modular process using the skid mounted unit to produce methanol at 3000 - 5000 ton/year (for Phase II). At present biogas is just flared frequently used in low value applications such as heating and/or upgradation to natural gas which requires an expensive CO separation process. Biogas 2 a sustainable and renewable gaseous fuel (EPA 2014) is suitable for direct conversion into syngas (H and CO) via reforming. CO removal from resulting syngas is not required and can 2 2 be converted to methanol which avoids cost related to gas purification. However there are technical challenges such as: (i) the reforming catalysts (supported Ni catalysts) are thermally unstable and are not resistant to coke formation which leads to their deactivation and metal sintering. (ii) Traditional conversion of syngas to methanol is expensive. In order to overcome these challenges ADEM developed a straightforward medium pressure thermocatalytic process for biogas conversion to syngas and an atmospheric pressure microwave plasma catalytic process for syngas conversion to methanol involving their in-house designed and produced catalyst materials. Preliminary data shows that ADEM's catalyst is highly promising with high coke resistance and high activity for 500 h of testing. Key words: Biogas Methanol Syngas CO Nanowires Bimetallic catalyst Bi-reforming. 2