Project description
Petrochemicals without petroleum and with significantly lower emissions
Petroleum, or crude oil, is not only the naturally occurring liquid hydrocarbon that is refined into fuel. It is also the starting point for many other industrially and societally important carbon-based chemicals broadly referred to as petrochemicals. Petrochemicals include common compounds such as ethylene, propylene and benzene used to make electronics, adhesives, paints, textiles, pharmaceuticals and food packaging. The EU-funded BIZEOLCAT project is developing a sustainable and cost-effective process to bring the use of light alkanes (methane, propane and butane) into petrochemicals. The multinational consortium that includes expertise in research and development, industry and standardisation is already planning a joint venture to ensure the work continues after the project finishes.
Objective
In the past there have been a number of semi-industrial trials and even commercial processes to obtain on-purpose petrochemical feedstocks from methane and/or propane (more generally, C1-C4 hydrocarbons). However, their commercial success has been limited due to several reasons: from technical drawbacks (low conversions and selectivity) to economics (high capital investment and high operation costs are often obtained). Furthermore there is a need for lowering the carbon footprint of gas and oil industry, i.e. refining industry, contributing to an evolving scenario of sustainable economy in such field. BIZEOLCAT is addressing the use of light alkanes as raw material for specialty chemical industry and not as feedstock for fuels in the current oil refining process, becoming part of this transition.
BIZEOLCAT will aim developing 4 new processes of light alkanes (methane, propane and butane) conversion to olefins (propylene, butadiene) and to aromatics demonstrating higher performance, cost efficiency and environmental sustainability, using innovative methodologies for catalysts preparation and membrane reactor design. A refining company, TUPRAS, will run the pilot unit experiments. One large companies, CEPSA will validate propylene and benzene as part of TR5 validation.
sLCA have demonstrated that the expected reduction in the greenhouse emissions related to the manufacturing of propane dehydrogenation developed within the project and also the Aromatization process in comparison to current Oleflex® and benzene production from a reformate plant is far over the target value of 20%.
A joint venture creation is part of BIZEOLCAT exploitation plan.
The BIZEOLCAT consortium comprises 12 partners: 2 technology centres, 2 research institutes, 2 universities, 1 Standardization body, 1 international association and finally 3 large industries and 1 SME from 8 countries (6 EU members, 2 associated countries to H2020)
Fields of science
- natural scienceschemical sciencesorganic chemistryhydrocarbons
- natural scienceschemical sciencescatalysis
- natural scienceschemical sciencesorganic chemistryaliphatic compounds
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringenergy and fuels
- social scienceseconomics and businesseconomicssustainable economy
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinator
08290 Cerdanyola Del Valles (Barcelona)
Spain