Low Levels of Zinc Exchanged into Cu‐SSZ‐13 Increase Methanol Production in the Partial Oxidation of Methane to Methanol

Cu‐SSZ‐13 is currently used industrially for the selective catalytic reduction of nitric oxides and has shown potential for the direct oxidation of methane to methanol. Here, how exchanging a small amount of zinc into Cu‐SSZ‐13 impacts the methane to methanol activity is reported. Samples containing only zinc are catalytically inactive. By contrast, small levels of zinc (Zn/Al = 0.06 or less) lead to a marked increase in methanol production. In the best case, Cu,Zn‐SSZ‐13 (Cu/Al = 0.21, Zn/Al = 0.06) has a site time yield (STY) of 26.4 ± 0.42 mmol mol‐Cu‐h −1 and specific activity (SA) of 11.5 ± 0.18 μmol g‐h −1 . This is over an 80% increase in both STY and SA over Cu‐SSZ‐13 samples with comparable copper loadings (Cu/Al = 0.2–0.26). A similar, but slightly less significant improvement, is observed for Cu,Zn samples at a copper loading of ≈0.12, where 50% increase in methanol production over just copper samples is observed. Infrared spectroscopy results suggest that the presence of zinc makes the copper more electron‐deficient, providing one possible explanation for the increased activity.