Technology Holding, LLC — Department of Energy SBIR Phase I: 22a

Description

Petroleum crude costs 6-8 times more than natural gas on an energy content basis. Moreover, approximately 97% NG is produced from domestic sources. Flaring of gas from small fields onshore and offshore has been practiced due to lack of cost effective solutions to monetize such gas. This presents numerous opportunities for producing value-added materials from natural gas at smaller distributed scales. Benzene, which is currently produced from crude oil, is a chemical of great industrial importance with current global consumption at 40 MMTPA. It is a starting material for Nylons, polycarbonates, polystyrene and epoxy resins. Also, benzene can be directly converted to aniline, chlorobenzene, maleic anhydride and succinic acid. Benzene is a gasoline component and can be converted to cyclohexane, another gasoline component via a commercial process. Benzene can be synthesized from natural gas in one step via dehydroaromatization (DHA). While the DHA process is commercially very attractive, the reaction suffers from lower equilibrium conversion (~12%) even at high temperature (~700 oC) and catalyst coking. If hydrogen, the co-product, is continuously removed, up to 100% single-pass conversion is feasible. Technology Holding LLC proposes to demonstrate a cost-effective modular reactor to convert natural gas to benzene at smaller scales operated in fuel cell mode. The objective of the proposed project is to demonstrate the feasibility of a combined catalyst-membrane scheme to yield high single pass conversion and significantly reduce coking. The proposed innovation does not require oxygen or air as reactants thereby enabling smaller scale economies of operation. Prior work by the proposing team has identified a resilient catalyst and a thermochemically stable, inexpensive, high flux, high selectivity hydrogen transport ceramic membrane. Initial laboratory scale technical feasibility of a combined catalyst-membrane reactor to yield supra-equilibrium conversion has been demonstrated. The proposed innovation will develop a scalable catalyst- membrane reactor to address conversion and coking technical challenges thereby dramatically improving the commercialization potential. Upon successful commercialization, the proposed innovation will help reduce or eliminate gas flaring, improve domestic production of value-added chemicals and help create domestic jobs.