Improved route from syngas to light olefins

Abstract

A catalytic technique has promise as a new way of industrially producing olefins such as ethylene and propylene. Manufacturers use low-molecular-weight olefins to make plastics, solvents, paints, medicines, and other products. The largest-volume organic chemicals produced worldwide, these “light” olefins have traditionally been made, and are still primarily made, by catalytic cracking of crude oil. Because of high oil prices and petroleum conservation efforts in past years, researchers developed two technologies as alternatives to catalytic cracking: the MTO (methanol to olefins) process and the FTO (Fischer-Tropsch to olefins) process. These methods use zeolite and metal catalysts, respectively, to convert syngas, a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, to olefins. The OX-ZEO (oxide-zeolite) technique, developed by Xiulian Pan and Xinhe Bao of Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics and coworkers, provides a third alternative (Science 2016, DOI: 10.1126/science.aaf1835). The researchers optimized a catal...