Abstract
Natural gas is a robust and environmentally friendlier alternative to oil resources for energy and chemicals production. However, gas is distributed globally within shales and hydrates, which are generally remote and difficult reserves to produce. The accessibility, transportation, and distribution, therefore, bring major capital costs. With today’s low and foreseen low price of natural gas, conversion of natural gas to higher value-added chemicals is highly sought by industry. Dry reforming of methane (DRM) is a technology pathway to convert two critical greenhouse gas components, CH4 and CO2, to syngas, a commodity chemical feedstock. To date, the challenges of carbon deposition on the catalyst and evolution of secondary gas-phase products have prevented the commercial application of the DRM process. The recent exponential growth of renewable electricity resources, wind and solar power, provides a major opportunity to activate reactions by harnessing low-cost carbon-free energy via microwave-heating. This study takes advantage of differences in dielectric properties of materials to enable selective heating by microwave to create a large thermal gradient between a catalyst surface and the gas phase. Consequently, the reaction kinetics at the higher temperature catalyst surface are promoted while the reactions of lower temperature secondary gas-phase are reduced.
Highlights
Current prices and foreseen prices of natural gas are pushing producers to find more value through converting methane, the dominant constituent, to higher value chemicals
The dielectric properties of the developed C-SiO2 were measured in a temperature range of 25 °C to 1000 °C (Extended Data Fig. 4), where the dielectric constant (ε′) is the ability of material to absorb electromagnetic wave, loss factor (ε′′) is the ability of material to dissipate the absorbed wave in the form of thermal energy and loss tangent is the ratio of loss factor to dielectric constant defining the efficiency of the microwave heating of the exposed material
Dry reforming of methane is an endothermic reaction, expressed as: CH4 + CO2 → 2CO + 2H2 ∆H2098 = +247 kJ mol−1 (1)
Summary
Natural gas is a robust and environmentally friendlier alternative to oil resources for energy and chemicals production. The recent exponential growth of renewable electricity resources, wind and solar power, provides a major opportunity to activate reactions by harnessing low-cost carbon-free energy via microwave-heating. Due to multiple thermodynamic equilibria, the DRM process is adversely impacted by the production of undesired by-products associated with the secondary gas-phase reactions: thermal degradation of methane, water gas shift reaction and carbon monoxide disproportionation[13]. To address the productivity deficiency with the DRM process, this study has focused on the application of microwave heating for the gas-solid catalytic reactions. This study advocates that the application of the microwave heating approach can increase the productivity of the DRM process through improved selectivity of the syngas components, hydrogen and carbon monoxide, while maintaining a high conversion of the reactants, methane and carbon dioxide, simultaneously
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