Joseph T Grant
The University of Wisconsin, USA
Title: Oxidative Dehydrogenation of Light Alkanes: a Sustainable Way to Platform Olefins?
Biography
Biography: Joseph T Grant
Abstract
Shale gas offers unprecedented opportunities for the chemical industry in the United States. It has recently become economically favorable to convert naptha crackers into ethane crackers to produce cheap ethylene. The downside of this is technology switch is a shortage of C3 and C4 olefins, causing a rapid increase in the construction of on-purpose olefin plants to meet the increasing global demand (e.g. around 100 million metric tons per year for propylene only). The state-of-the-art on-purpose dehydrogenation technology of propane-to-propylene is, however, energy intensive and suffers from catalyst deactivation due to coke formation. Oxidative dehydrogenation (ODH) is an attractive alternative with great potential for energy savings, if we were to prevent consecutive combustion of the desired olefins. In my lecture, I will give a brief literature overview and share our recent progress on a disruptive breakthrough. Indeed, by using a very different catalyst than those typically studied for ODH, we were able to increase the selectivity to propylene from 50% at 10% propane conversion to nearly 80% at 20% conversion. These results will be put into the economic context of the reconceptualization of the chemical industry in the framework of green chemistry