China’s Coal-To-Chemicals Success

Abstract

Standing in front of a wall-sized poster depicting a commercial-scale chemical plant, Zhongmin Liu talks animatedly about his research. The plant is so big, says the deputy director of China’s Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP), that a person could drive a small car inside some of the facility’s pipes. Sparking Liu’s excitement is a reactor in the facility that converts methanol to a mixture of ethylene and propylene, the building blocks that make up the industrial polymers polyethylene and polypropylene, respectively. Developed at DICP, in China’s Liaoning province, the reactor is a rare example of successful industrial technology development led by academic scientists. Before the reactor began running in 2010, researchers at DICP, an academic research institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, had been laboring for decades to develop a commercial process to convert methanol to olefins (MTO). The technology is key to making polyolefins from coal or ...