Methane and Natural Gas Utilization

Abstract

Natural gas is the cleanest fuel among fossil-based resources, but both its main components and its combustion product, CO2, contribute to concerns regarding climate change. In recent years rapid growth of the ratio of natural gas in the consumption of fossil fuel resources was witnessed due to the remarkable increase of its supply brought by the breakthrough of hydraulic fracturing technology, which also turned the largest fossil fuel importing country, the United States, into a net fuel exporting country. Over the same period an easing of atmospheric haze in China was also observed, aided by a transition from coal to natural gas–based district heating and industrial small capacity boilers. The IEA estimates that between 2010–2018 alone the switch from coal to natural gas for heating and power generation has avoided more than 500 million tonnes of CO2 emissions globally1, corresponding to the total annual CO2 emissions of 90 million people (based on the global average CO2 emissions per capita). Aside from its increasing use as fuel, the chemical utilization of natural gas, with its major component methane, has been a dynamic research topic both in scientific and engineering communities for many decades. Currently, only about 15% of natural gas is used as chemical feedstock, predominantly for the production of hydrogen (mainly for use in ammonia production and in refineries) and syngas (with methanol and its derivatives as main uses). However, strong interest in natural gas utilization for chemicals has been triggered by the increase in economically accessible natural gas reserves in many areas across the world and hence the potential to use a domestic resource as chemical feedstock in the face of increasing concerns regarding volatility and global destabilization. A transition to renewable energy sources could further free vast capacities of cheap and abundant natural gas, enhancing the long-term attractiveness of the chemicals market for natural gas utilization. Research on natural gas conversion has thus been a vivid reflection of societal needs, expectations of future energy demands and transitions, and environmental concerns for many decades. The oil crises in the 70's of the last century stimulated extensive research activities into this topic, leaving a vast amount of invaluable data and abundant literature on concepts in public resources which is forming the basis for a resurgence of research and commercialization activity. We are pleased to present 21 invited articles from honorable colleagues as a special issue of Energy Technology with the theme of “Methane and Natural Gas Utilization” and a focus on recent advances of natural gas utilization via catalysis and chemical routes. These papers cover natural gas utilization from the atomic to the process scale, ranging from the study of active surface sites and oxygen species in methane activation, kinetics of surface oxidation and free radical steps in the gas phase, and catalyst design and deactivation, to the coupling of endothermic and exothermic reactions, employing solar energy input and electricity output, comparison of reactor types, and the techno-economic evaluation of process designs. This issue also brings to you a number of mini-review articles on well-established (but often still elusive) methane utilization reactions, such as CO2 dry reforming, partial oxidation, oxidative coupling, and nonoxidative aromatization of methane, and on newly emerging approaches for methane utilization via chemical looping, reactive sorption, and alkane functionalization concepts. We would like to take this opportunity to express our appreciation to all the authors for their great contributions, and our gratitude to the supporting team of WILEY-VCH led by Dr. John Uhlrich for their support and help during the processing of the papers. We also thank all those colleagues involved in the refereeing of the papers in this issue. Yongdan Li received his PhD in 1989 from Industrial Catalysis Program of Tianjin University, China. He spent one year in the University of Twente as a visiting researcher and one and a half years in DCPR-ENSIC in INPL in Nancy as a post-doc. He got an associate professorship in Tianjin University and after a year he was promoted to full professor. He served as the Chair of the Industrial Catalysis Program and the Chairman of the Department of Catalysis Science and Technology in Tianjin until 2017. In 2017, he was appointed as Tenured Full Professor of at Aalto University, Finland. Götz Veser obtained a Diploma in chemical engineering from the University of Karlsruhe in 1990, and a PhD in physical chemistry from the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max-Planck-Society, Berlin (Germany) in 1993. Following a Feodor-Lynen Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Minnesota, he held positions at the University of Stuttgart and the Max-Planck-Institute for Coal Research. In 2002, he joined the University of Pittsburgh where he now holds the Nickolas DeCecco professorship for chemical engineering. His research interests focus on catalytic reaction engineering, functional nanomaterials, and process intensification, with application to clean energy production, carbon capture, and fuels processing.

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