Low-Cost Production of Ethylene
Separating pure ethylene from ethane is a complicated and expensive process. Researchers have come up with a new cost-effective method for the production of ethylene.The technique would avoid liquefaction and distillation by designing a material that only binds ethylene molecules, thus separating them from ethane.
Ethylene is part of many products we use every day from soda bottles to polyester clothing. To meet the growing demand, the Shell Oil Company is building an ethane cracker plant Beaver County, in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania. They aim to produce ethylene molecules from the abundant ethane found in natural gas.
The major drawback of this process is that it produces an impure mixture of ethylene and ethane due to the incomplete complete reaction. Researchers from the University of Pittsburg’s Swanson School of Engineering have invented a new method to combat the shortcomings, which makes this process efficient and cost-effective.
Low-Cost Production of Ethylene- What is the New Technique?
The technique would avoid liquefaction and distillation by designing a material that only binds ethylene molecules resulting in the separation of ethylene molecules from ethane.
Ethylene is a molecule with an unsaturated bond. It is also called as Olefin.
Current
methods of separating ethylene from ethane involve cooling the mixture to shallow temperatures, liquefying it, and feeding it into a large distillation column. This is an energy-intensive and costly process.The New technique is developed by a team led by Professors Karl Johnson from Chemical and Petroleum Engineering and Professor Nathaniel Rosi from the Department of Chemistry. The new process would potentially save a massive amount of energy, reducing carbon emissions and costs at the same time.
Low-Cost Production of Ethylene- The Principle Behind
The principle behind the new separation method is isolated copper atoms that olefins like ethylene can bond strongly. But, the copper atoms naturally clump together, which destroys their ability to bond with olefins. To address this issue, the Pittsburgh researchers used metal-organic frameworks- (MOFs) to effectively isolate single atoms of copper in the right location to produce ethylene found to be least 99.999% pure.
Johnson, the W.K. Whiteford Professor in the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, said that MOFs are a practical alternative to an inefficient and expensive process. He added that the uniqueness of metal-organic frameworks is that the isolated copper atoms are in the right oxidation state and the proper geometry within the metal-organic framework to provide very high selectivity.
