LAUSR

Abstract The inability to economically transport ethane from distributed shale gas production sites results in the “rejection”, i.e. flaring or reinjection, of this important petrochemical feedstock. Therefore, a technology capable of efficiently converting geographically isolated ethane into transportable liquid fuels would effectively exploit this abundant yet wasted resource. We proposed a modular ethane-to-liquids (M−ETL) system that employs a chemical looping-oxidative dehydrogenation (CL-ODH) scheme to convert ethane into olefins via cyclic redox reactions. The olefins would subsequently undergo oligomerization to form mid-distillate liquid fuels. In this study, a sodium molybdate promoted CaTi0.1Mn0.9O3 core-shell redox catalyst (CaTi0.1Mn0.9O3@Na2MoO4) is presented as a potentially viable, redox-active catalyst for the CL-ODH of ethane to ethylene. Performance data were collected from 1,600 + hours (>4,000CL-ODH cycles) of packed bed operations at varying temperatures and space velocities. 52 – 58% single-pass olefin yields at 725 and 730 °C were obtained with relatively low (2.5 – 8%) COx selectivity. The experimental data were used as inputs to an ASPEN Plus® based M−ETL system model to evaluate its performance. Sensitivity analyses were performed on the CL-ODH and oligomerization sections of the M−ETL system, and the results were used to inform economic analysis of the process. The techno-economic analysis (TEA) indicates that the introduction of recycle to the system provides flexibility for profit generation for both high (Xethane = 0.75) and low (Xethane = 0.58) conversion cases. Additionally, TEA results demonstrate that electrical cogeneration can be economically attractive under certain scenarios.