Industrial CO2 Reforming of CH4 Catalyst Development for Greenfield's Renewable 'Drop-in' Liquid-to-Fuel Technology

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This Engage plus continues the research initiated in the Engage project with GreenField. The project has just been completed but both the principle investigator and the company think it necessary to conduct more research so that they have a clear understanding of the direction of the technology research and development. As mentioned in the previous proposal, the conventional corn-to-ethanol fermentation technology just converts one third of the total carbon in corn into ethanol, leaving the other two thirds each into dry distillers' grains and carbon dioxide. Given the size of the production facilities at Greenfield Specialty Ethanol Inc. (Greenfield), over one thousand tons of carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere every day. To mitigate the carbon emission and make use of wasting carbon resources, Greenfield has developed a novel concept for renewable "drop-in" liquid-to-fuels production. The availability of commercial CO2 reforming of CH4 catalyst is the key to the development of such a dramatic technology. The previous Engage has established a reactor setup that is able to test the shaped catalyst pellets. The reactor, made of Inconel alloy, has 9.4 mm inner diameter, and the setup can condense vapour from the gas stream allowing to handle more varieties of feedstock. The project has found a binding material formulated a procedure to make catalyst pellets. The project also showed the powder catalyst and the pellet catalyst had the similar stable performance in stimulated industrial feedstock which contained water vapour and smaller amount of CO2 relative to CH4. This Engage plus project will fulfill the following tasks: Use of couple of more binding materials for shaped catalysts preparation, tests of the shaped catalysts for CO2 reforming of CH4, and tests of the catalysts available from other sources. All the testing conditions must be the industrial conditions that GreenField provides.