Phenolic compounds from biomass and coal to clean fuel H2 and CNTs

The development of cost and environmentally efficient catalysts is essential to transferring phenolic compounds to valuable fuels and chemicals. Various nanocatalysts with different amounts of Ni/Fe have been employed in the steam reforming of phenol, which showed high performance in terms of activity and stability. The conversion and hydrogen yield of phenol reforming over Ni/Fe-catalysts can reach 87% and 81%, respectively. The catalyst can keep its high reactivity for more than 200 h at the steam to carbon ratio (S/C) of 13.3, which is much higher than the previous report of 13 h. Using the newly developed Ni/Fe-catalysts in this research, the hydrogen-rich syngas or carbon nanotube (CNT) could be selectively produced via simply tuning the S/C ratio. The influence of the Ni/Fe ratio and S/C ratio on the steam reforming performance was investigated.

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acssuschemeng.6b01936