New catalyst improves conversion of butane into butadiene

The catalyst, developed by a team at North Carolina State University, is detailed in Science Advances.

Existing techniques for converting butane into butadiene create unwanted by-products or convert a small fraction of the butane into butadiene each time the butane passes through the chemical reactor.

“This is an expensive process in terms of both energy and money,” said Fanxing Li, corresponding author of the work and Alcoa Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at North Carolina State University. “Because after every pass through the chemical reactor, you have to separate the butadiene and by-products from the butane – which takes a lot of energy – and run the butane through the reactor again.”

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Consequently, there are very few plants devoted to producing butadiene. Instead, much of the butadiene used in manufacturing comes from plants where butadiene is collected as a by-product of other reactions.

“That’s a problem, because the demand for butadiene far outstrips the available supply,” Li said in a statement. “We wanted to come up with a more efficient way of converting butane into butadiene, making butadiene production facilities more commercially viable – and this work is an important step in that direction.”