CO2 Hydrogenation to Methanol

at this moment in the world we have really big problem of Natural Resources fossil fuels and also carbon dioxide together we have unclosed carbon cycle so we are taking taking a lot of energies from fossil fuel for example coal oil gas natural gas and we are just burning them and using for transport or taking electric energy out of it and at the end at the end of the day what we have is carbon dioxide which is accumulated in the atmosphere and at this moment conversion of this atmospheric carbon dioxide into fossil fuel is not done so in order to have elemental carbon management we need to close this carbon cycle from carbon dioxide into possibly Fuel and among all the chemicals which can be used as fuel we thought methanol can be one of the most promising one because methanol is a fundamental chemical in chemical industry for example for the production of form alide acetic acid Etc but also methanol can be used as fuel and this is very important we can drive car with methanol or blend with gasoline or we can actually use it as it is in fuel cell and this is very important so this feature also we can H in addition we we can use methanol as C1 feed stock so we can produce also olines very fundamental chemical so that's the reason why we decided to work on co2 conversion especially hydrogenation to methanol we decided to take a unique approach of high pressure reaction you may think that high pressure may be not advantageous it may be dangerous and also costly but it is not always like that what we can have is like a CO 2 and hydrogen when we mix them together when it is a compressive fluid so when we increase pressure the reactor size can become smaller smaller smaller the gas gets compressed so we can actually do the same amount of conversion within a much smaller reactor volume and this is a big Advantage for cost and also safety and another important thing is that when we have high pressure and high temperature we have super critical fluids and the gases are diffusing very fast so that we can expect enhancement of reaction rate and the most importantly the advantage is thermodynamics so when we increase the pressure for this reaction we can shift the equilibrium to the direction of products therefore we can produce methanol at high efficiency so in this setup what we have is high pressure hydrogen which is coming from here and we we have a hydrogen compressor and we boost the pressure as you see here over 400 bar and this is going to the some tubings for the buffer volume and then we reduce the pressure using pressure reducers and then the pressure is reduced as you see there a little bit lower than 400 bar and then go into this mass flow controller controlling the flow rate of hydrogen and going into the reactor and at the same time we have a CO2 carbon dioxide syringe pump so we take liquid CO2 in this syringe and then we can pump at a very low flow rate liquid CO2 and then they are mixed mixed together with the high pressure hydrogen so this hydrogen and the CO2 are passed at the defined flow rate from here and then it is going to the reactor which is very small we can call it micro reactor and then going out and then going to this so-called back pressure regulator this is the very important uh equipment H because it control the pressure of the reactor and after this back pressure regulator pressure is released and then go into gas chromatograph for chemical analysis using this high pressure approach we could actually Reach For The First Time The equilibrium conversion of this reaction so this means that the Catal catalytic process is reached to the thermodynamic limit so we cannot go exceed over even if we improve the Catalyst we cannot exceed this limit and we reach this point and this is very important because using good Catalyst this is important but also this condition we could reach the conversion limited by the thermodynamics and by that what I means we could achieve 95% conversion above that of CO2 and selectivity over 98% to methanol and also in this reaction we produce water as byproduct and we just pass this methanol and water reach stream to the another reactor and we could also show that we could convert methanol to di or methanol to olines or alanes this is something we could show using this high pressure approach and so far the produ productivity is by far the best in the world so at this moment we have the very nice performance but we can still improve so for example lowering the temperature but in order to lower the temperature we need to have better catalist how can we have better catalst we would like to design new type of catalst based on rational understanding to do so we would like to see the catalst and the reaction condition so in C2 operando Spectrum opy to see what's going on and we would like to design new generation of catalyst so that we can work with Pro possibly lower pressure and then lower temperature to be more sustainable and furthermore we would like to have this technology implemented industry so we would like to work on the scale up of this process

Channel: ICIQchem

Views: 114,807

Keywords: Carbon Dioxide (Chemical Compound), Methanol (Chemical Compound), Hydrogenation (Ranked Item), ICIQ, catalysis, catálisis, química

Id: GzjpmmtGBqU

Length: 7min 19sec (439 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 15 2014