May 2, 2016 – The Department of Energy awarded a grant to Principals of Skyhaven Systems, LLC to develop and demonstrate a new reaction process for converting natural gas into valuable C2 and C3 hydrocarbon compounds. With large increases in the worldwide natural gas reserves, it can be expected that natural gas will play an increasingly important role in energy and chemical supplies.  The past few decades have seen increased interest in processing the methane in natural gas to products.  The direct methane conversion using catalytic and thermal methods is made difficult due to the strength of the methane C-H bond. With the Gibb’s free energy of methane being much less than most hydrocarbons, it is difficult to obtain high yields using catalytic or thermal processes. In particular, catalytic processes involving partial or full oxidation using oxygen have often over-oxidized methane to carbon dioxide rather than valuable chemical products.

A new cold plasma reactor has been developed by Skyhaven Systems’ principals that can produce C2 hydrocarbons such as ethylene and acetylene in an array of micro-channel reactor cells. Using this reactor platform, a new catalyst structure is being developed that will integrate with this cold plasma reactor to enhance the reaction process. This catalyst structure will enable the controlled reaction of oxygen with methane to partially oxidize methane into high value C2 hydrocarbon products. This catalyst structure provides two beneficial enhancements to the cold plasma reactor, one being the controlled introduction of oxygen to avoid over-oxidizing methane and the second benefit being the enhanced plasma distribution about the catalysts that increases reaction yields. Process intensification is obtained by combining this catalytic structure within a cold plasma micro-channel reactor to process natural gas into valuable products including C2 and C3 hydrocarbons.