Improved Reactor and Catalyst for Light Alkanes to Olefins and Liquid Fuels

C47-22a-271388Current manufacturing of ethylene via ethane steam reforming comes with significant energy and carbon emissions costs. A route to low carbon ethylene will have a meaningful impact as ethylene production is the largest world-wide and US chemical process in terms of production volumes, energy consumed, and carbon emitted. This project fits well within an overall strategy for decarbonization of the US manufacturing industry. In this Phase IIB project we will develop a low energy, low carbon impact reaction strategy for producing ethylene. The process will maintain or improve on yields of ethylene from ethane while matching or reducing current ethylene costs. This scalable process can be deployed at this site of low volume producers or shut-in natural gas or shale gas wells or at large chemical production sites. Research tasks will focus on developing new chemical reactors and processing strategies to meet these goals while promising up to 88% carbon reductions as compared to ethane steam cracking. Prior work demonstrated reaction and process technologies for low carbon reduced energy conversion of ethane to ethylene while identifying additional improvements to processing and production strategies for cost reduction. We address these improvements in the Phase IIB research, including optimization of reactor design, processing parameters and adjustments to reaction chemistry to reduce costs. Taken together, these changes represent a fundamentally different method of producing ethylene while preserving product quality and throughput. Combined with modeling and economic analysis to further enhance the overall conversion process, the proposed work will enable a new economically competitive approach to ethylene and downstream processes, including gas to liquids. Success offers a natural gas or shale gas alternative to using crude oil for petrochemical and related products. Commodity chemical producers benefit from the reduction in carbon footprint at equivalent or lowered material costs, which in turn benefits consumers of ethylene derived products.