Abstract Understanding the nature of active sites in heterogeneous catalysts and how to create them purposefully opens up the possibility of tailored catalyst design. Here we report mixed-valence subnanometre CoO x clusters, consisting of a few metallic Co 0 atoms on top of Co 2+ , bound to a silicalite-1 support through lattice oxygen atoms as active species for non-oxidative propane dehydrogenation (PDH) to propene. Compared with commercial-like PtSn/Al 2 O 3 and K-CrO x /Al 2 O 3 catalysts also tested in the present study, as well as other state-of-the-art Pt- or Co-containing PDH catalysts, this system showed high on-stream stability, propene productivity and selectivity at close-to-equilibrium propane conversion. Moreover, it showed durability in a series of PDH/regeneration cycles between 500 and 550 °C. The performance of this catalyst system is industrially attractive in terms of propene production costs, as suggested by our initial techno-economic assessment.
Zhang et al. (Mon,) studied this question.