Chinese Academy of Sciences: World’s first industrial demonstration project for \"coal-to-alcohol\" production has been successfully commissioned

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Chinese Academy of Sciences: World’s first industrial demonstration project for \"coal-to-alcohol\" production comes online successfully. Author/Source: Date: 2017-03-17 Clicks: 26. Xinhua News Agency, Beijing, March 17 (Reporter Zhang Su) – Reporters learned at a press conference held by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing on the 17th that the world’s first industrial demonstration project for producing ethanol from coal, utilizing technology with independent Chinese intellectual property rights, has been successfully put into operation. Ethanol, commonly known as “alcohol,” is also recognized as an environmentally friendly cleaning fuel that can effectively improve the quality of gasoline. Countries such as the United States and Brazil have been developing fuel ethanol since the 1980s. However, out of concern over a situation of competing with people for food, China has not allowed the development of fuel ethanol based on grain. “Developing fuel ethanol through non-grain routes, that is, producing ethanol from fossil resources, is the goal of efforts worldwide. Given China’s coal-dominated energy structure, there is an urgent need to develop a complete set of technologies for coal-based fuel ethanol. ”Liu Zhongmin, deputy director of the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said. How does dark coal turn into ethanol? Liu Zhongmin said that scientists at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics proposed a process route that uses coal-based syngas as a raw material, and then proceeds through methanol and dimethyl ether carbonylation followed by hydrogenation to produce ethanol. This route uses non-precious metal catalysts to directly produce anhydrous ethanol. Since 2012, the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Shaanxi Yanchang Petroleum Group have been working together on research and development. On January 11, 2017, the 100,000-ton-per-year industrial demonstration project for producing ethanol from syngas owned by Shaanxi Yanchang Group completed the entire production process, yielding qualified anhydrous ethanol. He Jiuchang, chairman of Shaanxi Yanchang Petroleum Group, said that the industrial demonstration unit has been operating steadily for two months now; based on this, it can provide a basis for design as well as construction and operation experience for large-scale industrial ethanol plants with production capacities of millions of tons. Liu Zhongmin said that this project makes it possible to produce ethanol from coal as a raw material, and it also enables China to widely adopt ethanol-blended gasoline. Furthermore, ethanol is easy to transport and store, and can partially replace ethylene in the production of downstream chemical products. “In principle, just like coal, natural gas can also be used to produce ethanol through syngas. ”Liu Zhongmin said that coal-based ethanol technology can also be used to produce ethanol from natural gas, and it can be applied in regions along the \"Belt and Road\" that are rich in natural gas resources.