Lowering the carbon footprint of fabric and plastic manufacturing

Manufacturing of plastics and fabrics could become greener and have a lower carbon footprint, thanks to a new catalyst architecture developed by a team of experts including UCL academics. Propylene, produced from propane, is critical to the manufacture of plastics, fabrics and other chemicals, and is in short supply. Global demand is about 100 million metric tons per year, and its production involves the second largest conversion process in the chemical industry by scale. The most common method of producing propylene is steam cracking, which is one of the most energy intensive processes in the industry. By-products from oil and gas operations are usually used to produce propylene, but the recent shift to shale gas has limited its production. For the paper, published in Science , researchers at UCL, Tufts University, the University of Cambridge and the University of California at Santa Barbara used quantum chemical simulations run on supercomputers to predict the new catalyst architecture and its interactions with certain chemicals. Through this they have demonstrated its ability to produce propylene.