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A novel catalyst technology could dramatically cut the production costs associated with compressed natural gas (CNG).

In the drive to reduce pollution, compressed natural gas (CNG) is becoming an increasingly popular option for transportation fuels. Now a new catalyst-based technology being developed by Oxford Catalysts will make it possible to produce CNG more economically.

Oxford Catalysts Group designs and develops specialty catalysts for the generation of clean fuels from both conventional fossil fuels and certain renewable sources such as biomass.

Its patent-pending technology is the result of almost 20 years of research at the Wolfson Catalysis Centre at the University of Oxford, headed by professor Malcolm Green. The company’s strategy is to license its catalysts for commercial application by entering into co-development partnerships with leading manufacturers, producers and suppliers in the petroleum, petrochemicals, fuel cells, biogas, steam applications and catalysis markets.

To this end, the company has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Thai state controlled oil and gas company PTT for the development of the new technology. PTT is Thailand’s only fully-integrated oil and gas company, with a leading position in exploration and production, transmission, refining, marketing and trading of petroleum and petrochemical products. Together with its affiliates, the company accounts for approximately 20 per cent of Thailand’s gross domestic product.

The first step in CNG production is to upgrade the natural gas raw material by removing impurities, such as mercury and sulphur. This is typically carried out via chemisorption, a process that removes pollutants by involving them in a chemical reaction.

The efficiency of the chemisorption process depends heavily on the composition of the catalyst, or more precisely, the chemisorbent. Lab-scale tests show a new proprietary chemisorbent from Oxford Catalysts has a greater capacity, or ability to take up more pollutant per unit volume, than existing chemisorbents. The key to the improved performance lies in the chemisorbent composition – the combination of the metals used in the chemisorbent.

The new chemisorbent will be tested by PTT in two commercial side-stream units, one located onshore, and one offshore. An industrial scale field trial is also planned. Meanwhile, Oxford Catalysts is working with a major catalyst company to scale up manufacture of the new catalyst for commercial deployment.

Derek Atkinson, business development director Oxford Catalysts, says: “The trick with developing chemisorbents lies in finding the right combination of metals to react with the pollutants you want to remove. There is a government-mandated need in Thailand to move to cleaner transportation fuels, specifically to the use of CNG. The use of this technology will make it possible to produce clean fuels such as CNG more economically. This, in turn, will help to reduce the environmental problems associated with the use of conventional fuels in crowded Thai cities.”

Chemisorption is a process that relies on a chemical reaction – rather than physical forces – to capture molecules onto the surface of a solid. In chemisorption reactions, the reaction takes place on the surface of a catalyst. When the catalyst surface is saturated, the catalyst is replaced.

The chemisorption catalyst being developed by Oxford Catalysts and tested by PTT is based on the use of a chemisorbent with a novel composition. Mercury and sulphur are pollutants that are present in many natural gas fields, and those in Thailand are no exception. This new chemisorbent has a greater capacity, or ability to take up more pollutants per unit volume, than existing materials, say the two companies.

Oxford Catalysts has two key platform technologies. The first is based on a novel class of catalysts made from metal carbides. Aside from their lower cost, these catalysts offer a number of advantages. For example, in some reactions metal loadings can be reduced. In others, the need for precious metal promoters can be eliminated, while still retaining or even exceeding the benefits of traditional catalysts. Applications of these metal-carbide catalysts include hydroprocessing and the conversion of natural gas, biogas or coal into sulphur-free diesel.

The second involves catalysts that can be used to produce steam at temperatures between 100ºC and 800ºC instantaneously, starting from room temperature, from a liquid fuel containing dilute hydrogen peroxide and either an alcohol, sugar, glycerol, starch or formic acid. Such instant steam could have important applications in a broad range of markets, from cleaning and disinfecting, to green energy in the form of motive power or electricity.

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This is an article adopted from EngineerLive.com which I found interesting as my research group was recently discussing on the possibility of using Catalytic Plasma Reactor to minimize the problem of methane flaring. The original article (below) referred to a diagram which cannot be included in this post because it is too small… I tried to click and extract the photo, but I just can’t do it. I hope the photo can be viewed in a larger version later to provide us better comprehension on the catalyst and zeolite arrangement. OK, enough about that, check on the article below… You can also register with EngineerLive.com to be updated with various up to date engineering news.

The organisations involved are the US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Washington, the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) in Dalian, and China’s Institute of Coal Chemistry.
All three organisations are internationally recognised for research in developing improved technologies for safe and clean production of energy from coal and have mutual interests in:

o High temperature chemistry and diagnostics related to coal gasification.
o Functional sorbents design and development of syngas separations.
o Catalysis for hydrocarbon synthesis and conversions.

The three partner institutions have complementary research programmes without a lot of duplication. Where there are overlaps in currently funded projects, the teams initiate joint projects with each organisation using resources from their individual government funding agencies.
“With demand for energy – both electricity and transportation fuels – increasing, despite efficiency gains, coal usage is going to increase in both countries,” said Mike Davis, associate laboratory director for energy science and technology at PNNL. “Our challenge, on the research side, is to make it happen cleanly and economically. Together, I believe we can make important strides in this effort.”
“This is a unique opportunity to design and test new processes – such as carbon dioxide capture – that will reduce significantly the environmental impacts of coal usage,” said Doug Ray, associate laboratory director for fundamental science at PNNL.
Initially, the consortium is collaborating on air separation, coal gasification, cleanup and separation, and water gas shift reactions in the gas stream, hydrocarbon synthesis and carbon dioxide capture and utilisation.
However, the ICFCE’s first breakthrough has come with gas flaring. According to the Paris-based International Energy Agency, about 400m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent is released this way every year.

In new work, researchers have identified the structure of a catalytic material that can turn methane into a safe and easy-to-transport liquid. The insight lays the foundation for converting excess methane into a variety of useful fuels and chemicals.
“There’s a big interest in doing something with this ‘stranded’ methane other than flaring it off,” said PNNL chemist Chuck Peden. “An important thing researchers have struggled with is determining the structure of the active catalyst.’
That catalyst – molybdenum oxide sitting on a zeolite mineral – converts methane gas into the more tractable liquid benzene (Fig.1). But the process is not yet commercially viable. Scientists do not understand enough about the molecular details to improve the catalyst. Now, researchers at PNNL and the DICP have worked out some of the details that will help researchers zoom in on an efficient catalyst.
They reported their results 26th March in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. This work is the first publication to come out of the ICFCE.
To get these results, the chemists – led by Peden at PNNL and Xinhe Bao at DICP – used the world’s largest instrument of its kind – a 900-megahertz nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer. The NMR is armed with one of the strongest magnets constructed and can be outfitted to investigate solid samples, a step above its smaller cousins.
The combination of molybdenum oxide and a zeolite mineral had been shown in 1993 to convert methane, but the catalyst has been difficult to analyse. Researchers know that the zeolite anchors molybdenum oxide in place so methane and molybdenum oxide can react chemically, either on or in the zeolite channels. But no one could tell which comprised the reactive form: a small nugget of one or two molecules, or a larger cluster of many molybdenum oxide molecules.
“This uncertainty has led to a controversy in the scientific literature about the active phase and reaction mechanism of methane activation on these promising catalyst materials,” said DICP’s Bao.
Enter the world’s largest NMR. The technological problem lay in the molybdenum oxide itself. To study this particular oxide with NMR, the chemists needed to pick up the signal from one variant of molybdenum, 95Mo; the ultra-high field of the NMR, housed at the DOE’s environmental molecular sciences laboratory on the PNNL campus, allowed them to do so.
“The higher magnetic field improves the signal to noise,” said Peden. “And its large sample volume allowed us to put enough catalyst into the spectrometer to overcome the poor sensitivity of 95MoNMR.”

The researchers painstakingly prepared catalysts with increasing concentrations of molybdenum in the zeolite scaffold and focused the 900MHzNMR on the samples. The data revealed two different forms of the catalyst, as expected. One form contained the smaller nugget and the other form comprised the much larger clusters. When the concentration of molybdenum rose, more of these large clusters formed.
Then the team added methane and measured how much got converted into benzene by the catalysts. They found that when more smaller nuggets were present, more benzene was made, indicating the variety of one or two molybdenum oxide molecules was the reactive one.
Now, said Peden, the challenge is to design and produce the active form of the catalyst that could be used for large-scale benzene production, research that Bao and his group are already working on.
“We need to figure out how to get that structure and keep it that way,” concluded Bao.