(51a) Natural Gas to Ethylene in One Step- Siluria Technologies' OCM (Oxidative Coupling of Methane) Process

Natural Gas to Ethylene in One Step

Siluria Technologies’ OCM (Oxidative Coupling of Methane) Process

Sam Weinberger,  E. Scher, R. Iyer, et.al.

The oxidative coupling reaction of methane for direct, one-step conversion of C1’s to C2’s has been known for many years but never commercialized. Siluria Technologies has succeeded by bringing together 3 major scientific advances of the past decade that were unavailable to earlier researchers in this chemistry. The advances are (1) Biomaterial Templating - the use of easily genetically engineered biomaterials to determine the structure of inorganic catalysts grown on these templates, (2) Nanowire Catalyst Design - a synthetic method that permits the influencing of catalyst properties by changing the active sites, and which can be made under commercially scalable synthetic conditions, and (3) High-throughput Screening - for measuring gas-to-gas reactions very rapidly.

 In addition, all of Siluria's R&D and experimental work on the reaction has been limited to commercially viable process conditions and reactor configurations. Earlier work on this highly exothermic reaction, using catalysts produced by conventional bulk methods, was limited to temperatures or other process conditions that were outside of the practical engineering window for a commercial system.The rapid pace of natural gas discovery and development in North America and other regions provides a very strong business case for the deployment of this technology.