SBIR Phase I: Intensification of propylene oxide manufacture via solid-catalyst design

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This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project aims to develop a delaminated zeolite-based catalyst to facilitate more economical and environmentally friendly propylene-oxide (PO) production. PO is a commodity chemical with a $5.6B/year market. The two current pain points for PO producers are (i) that the currently used industrial catalyst lacks long-term stability under the harsh conditions at the tail-end of the PO synthesis reactor, and (ii) as a result of catalyst deficiency, that the process to manufacture PO consumes an extra $140M of raw materials per year, separate from the problem in (i) above. Berkeley Materials Solutions developed a catalyst for the tail-end of the PO synthesis reactor that nearly eliminates both of these problems. The catalyst allows for nearly 100% conversion of all raw material into PO, which leads to $145 M/year of additional revenue for PO producers, corresponding to a revenue increase of 8.6%. This increased revenue comes at no additional cost since it is a drop-in replacement. In addition, there are significant energy efficiency improvements associated with recovering the currently lost raw material in the PO synthesis process, which amounts to a CO2 footprint of ~740 kilo tons of CO2 per year worldwide.The intellectual merit of this project will be represented by the development of a generalizable crystalline catalyst platform to replace existing amorphous catalysts. Technical hurdles that will be addressed in the proposal are (i) the successful delamination of a layered zeolite precursor using a swelling method and sonication, (ii) establishing a sonication-free scalable delamination method for layered zeolite precursors, and (iii) the insertion of catalytically active heteroatom sites into the delaminates frameworks. If successful, this will enable the economical production of these zeolite catalysts for application in the PO synthesis reactor under flow conditions. The targeted scales even during Phase I activities are large enough to enable testing in collaboration with industrial partners who manufacture propylene oxide at large scales. These test results will be used to optimize the prototype catalyst. The results from Phase I activities will help to uncover other possible opportunities to use delaminated zeolites as highly efficient catalysts for chemical manufacturing.