ICIS Innovation Awards: Honeywell UOP

Advanced MTO makes its debut

The flexibility to produce olefins from coal or natural gas, via methanol, is set to change the industry landscape, says lead developer, Honeywell’s UOP

Honeywell UOP’s Advanced methanol-to-olefins (MTO) process, developed in collaboration with INEOS and Total, produces ethylene and propylene from inexpensive feedstocks such as coal and natural gas. “The transformational nature of this technology is going to change the world of ethylene and propylene and polyolefins,” says Jim Rekoske, global business director, petrochemicals, for the Process Technology & Equipment business unit at Honeywell’s UOP.

The MTO demonstration plant at Feluy in Belgium

The process has been under development since the 1980s when UOP scientists discovered a new molecular sieve, SAPO-34, and applied it to MTO chemistry. In the early 1990s UOP partnered with INEOS (at the time Norsk Hydro) to develop the MTO technology. This relied heavily on UOP’s fluidised bed reactor design, similar to that used in fluidised catalytic cracking. UOP identified that the ideal reactor type for the technology was a circulating fluidised bed reactor, which maximised mass transfer while simultaneously allowing for optimal operating conditions.

In the mid-1990s, UOP began to work with Total on developing a technology to convert naphtha-range olefins to ethylene and propylene. Total started the first olefin conversion process (OCP) demonstration plant in Antwerp in 1998. OCP proved to be the ideal process to convert the heavier olefins produced from MTO to light olefins. MTO and OCP were then integrated into a single Advanced MTO design and a demonstration plant started up in 2009.

Unique material
The development of the Advanced MTO process followed the same business model the company has always had, says Rekoske. “We recognised early on that SAPO-34 was a unique material and that there would be a time when the ability to decouple ethylene and propylene costs from naphtha and crude oil costs would be beneficial to the industry.

“We work on relevant technology for a long time. We don’t try to predict prices or what’s going to occur in the industry. We just know that we need to have a big enough and deep enough menu so that when our customers sit down at the table they know they can find what they want. That’s our objective as a company, to be a one-stop shop for our customers technology needs,” says Rekoske.

The market for light olefins is 230m tonnes/year and is growing at 4% per year, says Rekoske. Most of this growth is coming from polyolefins in China.

The other driver is feedstock costs. Nearly all the world’s ethylene production and over half of propylene production comes from steam cracking naphtha. But naphtha is also in demand as a transportation fuel and for aromatics production. “There’s a big need to decouple olefins production from naphtha and crude oil prices,” says Rekoske.

Methanol is instead linked to natural gas prices, which were delinked from crude oil prices a few years ago. Also, China has large coal reserves which gives companies there the option to further decouple from crude prices.

“Carbon from coal is a seventh or an eighth of the price of a tonne of carbon from crude,” says Rekoske. “Even if only a small proportion of polyolefins comes from MTO in the future, companies still have a means to leverage the industry. Having an option always gets you a better price,” he adds.

The other benefit to customers is that the process only produces ethylene and propylene. “You don’t have to be in the butadiene, butenes or aromatics chains, like you do with a naphtha cracker,” he says. It also produces substantially more light olefins than a naphtha cracker.

The first commercial unit started up in September 2013 at Wison Clean Energy Company’s coal chemical complex in China producing 300,000 tonne/year of ethylene and propylene. By mid-2015 four plants will be operating in China with a combined capacity of approximately 2m tonne/year. A further three licences in China have also been signed.

Interest
Rekoske says there has also been substantial interest from countries with stranded natural gas where getting natural gas out of the country is complicated for practical and political reasons and producing and exporting polyolefins would be preferable. There has also been interest from Scandinavia and other countries in northern Europe for projects that would use biomass as a feedstock. These projects are further down the track as work first needs to be done on getting the carbon in the biomass into a form for gasification.

“I really believe this is the dawn of a new era of making ethylene and propylene and we’re excited to be at the edge of it,” says Rekoske.