Technical Session: Mesoporised Zeolites towards a Sustainable Future

Zeopore’s industrial mesoporized zeolites make current processes in oil refineries and petrochemical plants more profitable, flexible and sustainable. Zeopore’s innovative zeolites facilitate or enable the faster development of emerging markets such as sustainable fuels & chemicals, CO₂ capturing or advanced plastic waste recycling.

Mesoporous zeolites have gained a reputation as excellent catalysts, but are traditionally associated with a high price tag, degraded intrinsic zeolitic properties, and poor industrial scalability. Zeopore has tackled all these challenges and is able to convert any commercially available zeolite into a high-performing mesoporous zeolite at an attractive value proposition.

Post-synthetic zeolite mesoporization also offers significant synergies with zeolite crystallization and catalyst making. For example, post-synthetic mesoporization enables to decouple the need for increased external surface from the hydrothermal synthesis, and as such allows using less advanced starting zeolites, leading to a more economic purchasing position and more security of supply. Alternatively, the favorable synergy between mesoporization and catalyst making allows for much more efficient metal deposition.

A unique platform of mesoporized faujasite catalysts and ZSM-5-based additives has been developed for fluidized bed type cracking processes such as FCC or Crude-to-Chemicals. These highly porous materials feature enhanced hydrothermal stability, delivering substantially increased conversion rates, olefin yields and other significant benefits.

In hydrocracking, our advanced faujasites, combine accessible mesoporosity, with a preserved microporosity, and a proprietary application-specific acidity. Only those materials enable to yield up to 4wt% gains in middle distillate selectivity in combination with a higher activity.

The benefits of mesoporization in dewaxing are even higher based on the unfavorable ratio between the size of the substrate molecules to be converted and the diameter of zeolite micropores. Here, tailored mesoporization technologies enable 5-fold improvement of diesel or lube retention as a function of cloud or freeze point improvement.

In chemical waste plastics recycling, the advanced mesoporization technology is of great value in the further work-up of pyrolysis oil derived from thermal cracking of waste plastics. But more strongly, in the catalytic pyrolysis of waste plastics itself, the new mesoporization technology yields order-of-magnitude activity improvements over conventional zeolites.

Currently, Zeopore is shifting from demonstrating the added value of its tuned mesoporized zeolites towards industrial scale-up and commercialization in collaboration with leading international parties. Zeopore customizes its manufacturing processes to the industrial demands of various partners towards industrial runs scaled up to several tons of zeolite catalysts.

Speakers

KURT DU MONG

KAUST

KAUST Research Centers

KCC Research Groups