Natural Gas Reaction Engineering

The utilization of fossil fuels, primarily petroleum, has been at the core of affordable and abundant fuels, intermediate chemicals and end products over the past century. The emergence of significant national natural gas plays, coupled with thermocatalyic pathways, provides the potential to decrease dependence on conventional petrochemical routes towards a variety of products, including gasoline, diesel, methanol, ethanol, ammonia, hydrogen, aromatics, and a variety of oligomers and polymers. However, conventional petrochemical approaches are tailored for petroleum feedstocks, and thus, alternative pathways will need to be developed and optimized for the chemical nature of natural gas feeds. This session will highlight direct and indirect thermocatalytic processes for the conversion of "dry gas", "wet gas", and "raw natural gas" to higher value fuels and conventional petroleum derived chemicals. Furthermore, the session will focus on providing a forum to demonstrate multi-disciple, integrated approaches to reaction engineering focused on overcoming the technical challenges associated with the utilization of domestic natural gas resources.