Enhanced Methane Dehydroaromatization via Coupling with Chemical Looping

Methane dehydroaromatization (DHA) is a desirable process for the conversion of methane in stranded natural gas to valuable and easy-to-transport liquid aromatic compounds. However, the reaction is severely limited by thermodynamics. We present a method to circumvent the thermodynamic limitation by coupling DHA with chemical looping to achieve reactive separation of H2 from the products of DHA. The proposed strategy involves a four-step cycle, i.e., DHA on the Mo/H-ZSM-5 catalyst, hydrogen removal, and regeneration on the Fe3O4/FeO redox pair, and water removal on Zeolite 5A. The feasibility of this process is validated by investigating each step individually. The results indicate that an aromatics yield up to >40% is possible with the proposed process.