Re: Methane to liquids

Marshall Dudley wrote:
> 
> I am wanting to build a small methane to liquid converter. I can live
> with either methanol or a liquid hydrocarbon output.

Can't be directly done - and oh how petroleum companies have
desperately tried!  The whole Arabian Pensinsula is aflame at night
from vented burning methane.  Alaska is fat with uselsss natural gas. 
Anything that would allow methane-to-liquid conversion would be hot
stuff.  Pipelining a gas is not efficient compared to liquids. 
Rock-like methane hydrate requires punctiliously dried input - even
ppm water is an eventual problem.

The best you can do is methane to syn gas to methanol to ZSM-5 high
aromatic feedstock.  It isn't economic at the wellhead.  Bubbling
methane into concentrated sulfuric acid plus palladium is silly except
as a publication.

One might imagine methane plus steam going into a superacid zeolite or
hot dispersed scandium triflate, both impregnated with palladium,
might give you a direct methanol/methyl ether feedstream, and then
into ZSM-5.

-- 
Uncle Al
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 (Toxic URL! Unsafe for children and most mammals)
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Paul J. Franklin(moderator - sci.chem.organic.synthesis) 
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Georgia State University <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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