【Ten Years of Great Progress in Chemical Technology】048-2023: Significant breakthroughs achieved in the development of catalysts for coal-based olefin production

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This post was last edited by Desert Fish on June 4, 2023, at 09:06. There has been significant progress in chemical technology over the past decade; let’s celebrate the prosperity and strength of modern China. By sharing our ideas, we can encourage more people to participate and make the discussions more lively. The HaiChuan forum becomes even better with your involvement – we welcome everyone to join in the discussions and exchanges. Everyone should pay attention to safety and know how to handle emergencies. ********************************************* After years of research, scientists from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, have recently made important breakthroughs in the development of catalysts for coal-based olefin production. These findings were published online in the international academic journal Science on May 19th. Low-carbon olefins are important chemical raw materials, widely used in the production of various plastics, solvents, drugs, cosmetics, and more. Traditional olefin production uses petroleum as raw material, while China’s energy structure, which is dominated by coal, makes it highly significant to develop coal-based olefin production technologies. A research team led by Researcher Pan Xiulian and Academician Bao Xinhé from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, first proposed the oxygenate-zirconia (OXZEO) catalytic conversion technology for syngas in 2016. This technology overthrew the \"Fischer-Tropsch\" process that has been used in the international coal chemical industry for over 90 years; it surpassed the theoretical limits regarding the selectivity of low-carbon olefins, thereby opening up a new pathway for coal conversion that features low water consumption and low emissions. In 2020, the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, in collaboration with enterprises, completed industrial-scale tests demonstrating the feasibility of producing thousands of tons of olefins per year. Building on this foundation, the team spent over six more years on in-depth research and numerous experiments, and recently overcame the bottleneck of being unable to achieve both high conversion rates of raw materials and high selectivity of products. They developed an efficient catalyst that enables both objectives to be met, increasing the efficiency of the catalysts they had previously created by more than twice. In the future, the application of this achievement in the field of chemical production will help ensure energy and resource security, thereby facilitating China’s early achievement of its \"dual carbon\" goals.