(438b) The Electrochemical Partial Oxidation of Methane to Methanol on MnOx.

The utilization of greenhouse gases to produce energy and products is of great interest. The direct electrochemical partial oxidation of methane to methanol is of particular interest in the oil and gas industry. Previous efforts of our group have been employed to study the effect of a range of electrodeposited transition metal oxide films on a cylindrical electrode through a series of experiments and DFT calculations. The work proved certain transition metal oxides to be active for the electrochemical transformation of methane to methanol with high selectivity. The previous work thoroughly studied cobalt (oxy)hydroxide. In this work, we focus our analysis on the performance of manganese (oxy) hydroxide as a catalyst for the partial oxidation of methane. Namely, we test the effect of the applied potential and the rotation speed on the selectivity of methanol production. The results show that at intermediate oxidative potentials and high rotational speeds both methanol and acetate are produced; however, MnOx catalyzes the partial oxidation reaction with high selectivity towards acetate production.