Towards Harnessing Local Minerals as low Cost Catalyst Extruded as Honeycomb Monolith for Syngas Production

By Prof. Tarik Chafik, FST, Abdelmalek Essaadi University, Tangier, Morocco

The study deals with design and engineering of low-cost catalyst based on Moroccan natural clay with appropriate texture and chemical composition containing mainly aluminosilicates as well as mixture of minerals. The clay enables easy extrusion as honeycomb monolith and related advantages which may help moving ahead towards industrial application. Of interest also, the possibility of tuning the catalytic behavior through incorporation of appropriate active phases and promoters. The catalyst system showed efficient behavior towards syngas production through conversion of methane and CO₂ considered both as major greenhouse gases. The designed and developed catalytic system was tested using model reaction mixture containing CH₄, CO₂ and O₂. The issue is of interest regarding current growing awareness about global climate change and also for reforming of biogas generated by landfill wastes regarding the current context of circular economy. Furthermore, the process offers interesting possibility to be sustained using renewable energy sources enabling, thus, profitable integration of power to X technologies.

Keywords: Clay; Catalyst; Syngas, Methane; reforming; honeycomb; monolith

Biography

Currently full Professor, Research Director and Master courses coordinator at FST of Tangier (Morocco). He graduated from the University of Lyon. He was Post-doc researcher at Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Patras, Greece then he worked at AIST, Japan and University California Berkeley. His ongoing research focus on sustainable development technologies for atmospheric pollution control and energy applications as PI of several research projects (h-index 23).