With the discovery of vast amounts of accessible natural gas in large tracts at many locations around the world, comes the potential of inexhaustible feedstock for the petrochemical industry. Ethane is by far the preferred choice for production of ethylene in North America and the dominant technology is steam pyrolysis. The selectivity and conversion are typically 80% and 65% respectively. An alternative to this is the promise of Oxidative Dehydrogenation of Ethane using the M1 catalyst. Such processing allows high selectivity and high conversion of ethane in a vapor phase, heterogeneous, exothermic reaction occurring at low temperatures of 325-350 C. During the evaluation of processing and economic metrics to completely assess the promise of the Oxidative Dehydrogenation process (ODH), it was discovered that in all measures, ODH is superior to conventional steam pyrolysis. Evaluations were also performed using a cost of production methodology which results in a required netback which can then be compared to current contract or spot prices for ethylene. The reduced scope for the ODH option also results in the possibility of competitive economics even with drastically reduced scale, thus accommodating one of the Department of Energy’s themes for modularization and process intensification. A complete techno-economic analysis and set of process metrics will be presented. <br/>

Evaluation of processing for G2GI (gas to gasoline and intermediates) using ODH (oxidative dehydrogenation of ethane)

254th National Meeting (2017)

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