Supported Iron Nanoparticles as Catalysts for Sustainable Production of Lower Olefins

Abstract

From Plant to Plastic: Petroleum is primarily used as fuel, but it is also used in the production of plastics. Thus, if biomass were to replace petroleum as society's carbon feedstock, a means of deriving ethylene and propylene—the principal building blocks of today's commodity plastics— would be helpful. Well-known Fischer-Tropsch (FT) catalysts can transform gasified biomass into a range of hydrocarbon derivatives, but ethylene and propylene tend to constitute a small fraction of the overall product distribution. Torres Galvis et al. (p. 835 ) now demonstrate a class of iron catalysts on relatively passive supports (carbon nanofibers or α-alumina) that robustly directed the FT process toward light olefins.