Northwestern Awarded Grant to Study Converting Methane to Fuel
January 31, 2008
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The Dow Chemical Company announced recently that Northwestern University and Cardiff University have been awarded research grants which together total over $6.4 million as part of the 2007 Dow Methane Challenge.
Professor Tobin Marks, Vladimir Ipatieff Professor of Catalytic Chemistry and Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University, will lead the team that includes professors Peter Stair, Harold Kung, Justin Notestein, Linda Broadbelt, and Mayfair Kung.
The focus of the challenge is conversion of methane – the major component of natural gas – to chemical feedstocks, which are raw materials used in the industrial process. Methane is particularly attractive as a raw material because of the presence of large reserves of natural gas in many parts of the world, but the technology for the conversion of these reserves to chemicals and liquid fuels remains elusive. The goal of the challenge is to develop technologies to take natural gas and produce the intermediates that form the foundation of today’s chemical industry.
The Northwestern group will integrate creative synthesis, catalytic reaction mechanism studies under a variety of conditions, atomic scale catalyst characterization using a wide spectrum of cutting-edge physical techniques, and high level computational modeling to achieve selective methane oxidation to olefins or other useful feedstocks via three very unconventional, complementary approaches.
Conversion of methane to more useful chemicals using molecular oxygen is difficult because methane molecules are very inert; it’s difficult to react with the molecule’s bonds without reacting with the bonds of the desired products, which would degrade the products.
As part of the challenge, Harold Kung, professor of chemical and biological engineering, and his group will look at methods to create catalyst materials to accomplish this by tricking the system so the methane molecule and the reaction products would experience different environments and react differently. Their plan is to engineer catalysts that are compartmentalized at the nanometer scale, where the compartments have different environments. Their research will focus on coupling the needs of different products and devising methods to synthesize the catalyst.
Christopher Marshall and Jeffrey Elam at Argonne National Laboratory and Matthew Neurock at the University of Virginia are also part of the team.
