Membranes And Catalysts Beyond Economic and Technological Hurdles

Project Information

MACBETH

Grant agreement ID: 869896

DOI

10.3030/869896

Project closed

EC signature date 30 October 2019

Start date 1 November 2019

End date 31 January 2025

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Advanced manufacturing and processing

Total cost

€ 20 611 394,29

EU contribution

€ 16 606 129,56

Coordinated by

EVONIK OXENO GMBH & CO KG
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - MACBETH (Membranes And Catalysts Beyond Economic and Technological Hurdles)

Reporting period: 2023-11-01 to 2025-01-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

In all sectors of the process industry, downstream processing requires a significant share of the overall energy and resource consumption. To significantly enhance the competitiveness of the European process industry and to contribute to Europe’s goal of a clean and liveable environment, it is highly desired to have a very broadly applicable concept for an efficient integration of downstream operations in the overall process chain. The MACBETH consortium provides this breakthrough technology by combining catalytic synthesis with the corresponding separation units in a single highly efficient catalytic membrane reactor (CMR).

This disruptive technology has the ability to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of large volume industrial process by up to 45 %. Additionally, resource and energy efficiency will be increased by up to 70%. The revolutionary new reactor design has a tremendous competitive advantage since CAPEX is decreased by up to 50% and OPEX by up to 80%.
To achieve this, the MACBETH consortium combines the catalytic synthesis step with the highly efficient separation step via a tailor made membrane. The predecessor EU funded projects ROMEO, BIONICO and CARENA have laid the strong basis by showing the proof of concept for CMRs at TRL 5 for the following highly relevant and large scale processes:
• Hydroformylation
• Hydrogen production
• Propane dehydrogenation
Key members of these consortiums have joined forces in MACBETH to bring CMR to the level of TRL 7 for all three processes and finally to commercialisation. In this unique approach of combining three successful European projects to the joint MACBETH endeavour at a higher TRL we demonstrated on the foundation of a large variety of building blocks such as catalysts, membranes, support materials and reactor concepts that CMR are broadly applicable at significantly different conditions in virtually any sector of process industry that requires a separation after a catalytic synthesis.
Since, according to SusChem , more than 80% of the processes in the chemical industry worth approximately 1,500 bn €, depend on catalytic technologies, a huge impact can be assumed in other sectors with high confidence.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

In this section, the project results are presented in brief with respekt to the project's objectives.

1) Benefits of integrated catalytic membrane reactors (CMR) demonstrated at TRL7
The demo plants for BOC and HYFO cases were running successfully for 2500 hours and 13000 hours, respectively. Highly relevant data were obtained in order to judge the economical and sustainability potential of the technology. Due to budget constraints caused by extremely high inflation some modifications concerning plant sizes and duration of operation had to be made for H2 and PDH cases. Demonstration phase for these cases started in Q4/2024. Except for the implementation at TU/e the PDH-case demonstrators ran at TRL 5 and TRL 6 at UNISA and TUPRAS for 500 hours at their expected operational range. For the H2-case, good progress could be achieved with the natural gas demonstrator implementation at CNH2/H2-Site. The biogas demonstrator could not be run at BioValo/ENGIE site as intended because the approval of the French authorities to operate the demonstrator was not available in due time. As a replacement, the demonstrator was operated at ICI premises for a limited amount of time in January and February 2025.

2) Improved and scaled up building blocks (TRL7) implemented in CMR
RKV delivered more than 300 alumina porous supports to TEC for membrane production. 195 finished membranes were delivered for installing two hydrogen production demo plants and 20 membranes were delivered for equipping 3 propane dehydrogenation demo plants. For the HYFO-case, 56 SiC-based, coated monoliths were provided for installation into the membrane reactor. Later on, another 52 -Al2O3 based coated monoliths provided by Rauschert/Hereon were installed into the HYFO-CMR-plant to perform a 2nd phase of demonstration for approx. 2000 hours. Membranes for the BOC case were chosen from commercially available types. Catalysts were developed, manufactured and provided for all the cases in sufficient quantities to run the demonstrators. The amounts of rhodium catalysts for hydrogen production needed to be adjusted as Rhodium has seen a unprecedented price increase.

3) Modelling for building blocks (micro) and system (macro) established for four application sectors
At building blocks level specific permeation models for each type of membrane (DS Pd and polymeric membranes) and for each type of catalyst have been developed. The building blocks models have been integrated within 4 different membrane reactor models, subsequently used in the system analyses against the identified benchmark technologies to assess the potential techno-economic advantages of the MACBETH solutions. All MR models have been implemented in Aspen Custom Modeler (ACM). One customized model for each family of reactions and processes similar to the ones studied in MACBETH was developed.

4) Business case for Lighthouse Catalytic Membrane Reactors (LCMR) developed
With the help of professors of TU/e and Polimi as well as the MACBETH consortium, this small team conducted market research and rebranded itself as Modelta B.V. which was officially registered at the Dutch Chamber of Commerce in October 2022. The team has expanded since 2024 to 4 people, now on top of the CEO and CTO having a market analyst and computational scientist. Modelta B.V. aims to specialize on modelling services and consultancy on membrane and membrane reactor technology for the manufacturing industry in the short and medium term, aiming to become a knowledge single-entry point on membrane reactor technology in the long term.

5) Education tools for disseminating project results to wide audience applied
A first Webinar on “Introduction to membrane reactors” was held on November 5th 2021. The webinar has been well received with 87 participants online. A winter school took place at TUE premises in January 2024. The knowledge generated in Macbeth is being integrated in different courses of academic Macbeth partners. Various doctoral and master theses have been carried out on Macbeth relevant research activities.
General disemination activities included 35 publications in public media, 31 scientific publications, 351 Social Media posts, 144 posts on project website, 13 project videos published as well as numerous press releases.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The confidence of the MACBETH consortium to reach its highly ambitious goals are underlined by two special extensions that go well beyond the ordinary scope of an EU project:
• Transfer of CMR technology to a new sector already within MACBETH at TRL 6: selective enzymatical cleavage of fatty acids (Biocatalytical Oil-Cleavage - BOC-case)
• Creation of the spin-off European “Lighthouse Catalytic Membrane Reactors” (LCMR) within MACBETH as a European competence centre that provides access to the combined knowledge of the MACBETH project with respect to all relevant disciplines such as building blocks, modelling and system integration valorizing the project’s results through the structured offering of commercial services to interested stakeholders.

Schematic presentation of MACBETH technology combining synthesis and separation units in a single re

MACBETH project set-up and the way beyond