Zhongmin Liu | AIChE

Zhongmin Liu

Professor Zhongmin Liu received his PhD in Physical Chemistry from Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) in 1990. He is the member of Chinese Academy of Engineering. He has been the Director of DICP and the Director of Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology, CAS, since 2017. Prof. Liu, together with partners and his colleagues, has successfully accomplished the industrial demonstration test of methanol to olefin technology (DMTO) in 2006. Based on DMTO, the world's first commercial coal to olefin plant was built in 2010, which was a milestone for C1 resource to chemicals. Up to now, 24 DMTO units have been licensed with the olefins production capacity of 13.86 million t/a. Prof. Liu and his team also developed an ethanol production process via carbonylation of DME and further hydrogenated, which leads to the world's first 10 KTA coal to ethanol plant in 2017 in Shaanxi, China. He has also developed many other new catalysts and catalytic process, such as propylene to isopropanol, and methanol to dimethyl ether. Many of them have been commercialized. He published more than 300 papers, filed 300 patents and got many awards such as The National Technological Invention Awards First Prize on DMTO.