I am excited to share that a paper I worked on as a co-author with Guido Zichittella, Prof. Guillén-Gosálbez and Prof. Pérez-Ramírez of ETH Zürich has just been recently been published! It is titled: Catalyst: A step forward for PVC manufacture from natural gas (Available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chempr.2022.02.012).

We summarize recent findings of the catalyzed direct chlorination of ethane, which provides a viable alternative to conventional ethylene (generally sourced from naphta) as a feedstock for vinyl chloride monomer manufacturing (VCM). Natural gas-based VCM would then be polymerized to PVC. This VCM manufacturing process is be enabled by advances in HCl recycling processes such as the Deacon reaction or electrochemical conversion.

We found that this alternative process has the potential to yield significant cost reductions as well as moderate global warming potential impact emissions reductuions with repect to the convential “balanced route”. These benefits depend on the successfull scale-up of the catalyst and reactor, as well as a careful implementation of chlorine recycling and necessary seperation steps of the process.