Authors:

Cora Powell

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About Paper:

In the last 20 years, the US has developed new drilling technology to produce oil and gas from deep shale formations. These hydrocarbons have potential to produce gasoline and diesel transportation fuels. When converting small hydrocarbons like ethane and propane into diesel fuel, these alkanes are first converted to more reactive olefin, e.g., ethylene and propylene. Currently, there are two types of catalysts that convert these olefins in to higher molecular weight hydrocarbons, Brönsted acids and transition metal alkyl compounds. However, neither of these are ideal. Brönsted acids make poor diesel fuel and deactivate rapidly, while transition metal alkyl compounds are sensitive to exposure to air and water and cannot be reused or regenerated. Our goal was to prepare new Lewis acid catalyst compositions that are active, stable, and regeneratable for the oligomerization of olefins to higher diesel fuel hydrocarbons. The goal of this project is to identify new, potential catalysts for further development. We prepared and tested several Lewis acid catalyst compositions to determine if they have potential for converting propylene to higher molecular weight hydrocarbons. Since alumina is a Lewis acid catalyst that successfully performs oligomerization, although with low rates and poor selectivity to diesel fuel, we compared our catalysts to alumina to find which catalysts have a higher rates and better product distributions than alumina. A 10% cobalt on alumina catalyst was the most successful of all the catalysts, with about a 9% conversion compared to about 1.5% for alumina. In the future cobalt should be optimized for higher activity, evaluated at a higher pressure and conversion to determine what products are possible. Additional catalyst compositions are also under investigation.

Source:

Purdue University / 2023

Topics:

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Co-authors:

Cora Powell