Modular Gas to Chemicals Reactor

The rapid increase in oil and natural gas (O&G) production in the United States since around 2005, driven primarily by hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, has led to major concerns about increasing methane emissions and adverse climate impacts. It is commercially not feasible to transport natural gas over long distances due to high cost of liquefaction. Particularly, natural gas produced at a remote location is often flared and wasted due to lack of economic utilization. The cost advantage of natural gas will result in many opportunities for producing value added chemicals thereby reducing petroleum crude consumption in the process industry. Natural gas can be converted to syngas followed by methanol or Fischer-Tropsch fuels via catalytic processes. These technologies are commercial, expensive and require centralized operations while offering only incremental innovation possibilities. Direct oxidation of Natural gas to chemicals (e.g. ethylene, acetic acid) has been investigated with limited success due to highly exothermic runaway reactions leading to legitimate safety concerns. Further, need for pure oxygen requires high capital. Direct dehydroaromatization of methane to benzene and hydrogen as co-product, without using oxygen is promising route for gas conversion. Although, the process is commercially very attractive, it suffers from two technical challenges including kinetic -catalyst coking and thermodynamic - limited equilibrium conversion (12% at 700°C) even at high temperatures. Solving the kinetic challenge requires a highly active and benzene selective coke resistant catalyst. Overcoming the equilibrium limitation requires continuous selective separation of hydrogen at reaction temperatures. If hydrogen is continuously removed, up to 100% single-pass conversion becomes ultimately possible from the thermodynamic vantage point. This project aims to develop transformative catalyst membrane reactor to substantially increase single pass conversion of methane. Since the proposed innovation does not use oxygen, it is suitable for small scale, modular and infield gas conversion. The produced chemical is a liquid that can be easily transported. Prior work demonstrated the preliminary technical feasibility by increasing the conversion. The proposed project will further optimize and scale-up the membrane reactor for distributed conversion of natural gas. The overall objective of the proposed phase II project is to scale-up and demonstrate techno-economic feasibility of gas conversion to chemicals. A modular and small scale process plant will be designed to be suitable for a trailer mounted unit. Upon successful commercialization, the proposed innovation will enable domestic production of chemicals from natural gas, help reduce or eliminate flaring, reduce the total life cycle greenhouse gases footprint and domestic high paying jobs will be created.