MACBETH project reaches important milestone

The Membranes And Catalysts Beyond Economic and Technological Hurdles (MACBETH) project, the largest EU-funded research project co-ordinated by Evonik, has reached its first milestone after 18 months in operation.

The EU Commission has evaluated the project for the first time, and with positive results. The goal of MACBETH is to develop technologies that make important large-scale reactions, such as hydroformylation, significantly more energy efficient. The supervisors believe that the partners involved are on the right track.

Professor Dr Robert Franke, Project Co-ordinator and head of hydroformylation research at Evonik, said: "With the positive evaluation, we have secured the support of the EU and achieved a very good interim status."

The EU is funding the measure with a total of €16.6m. 24 partners from ten countries are working on four subprojects until 2024, with the aim of making large-scale reactions more energy efficient. One subproject is being carried out at Evonik at the Marl Chemical Park and concerns hydroformylation. The aim there is to develop so-called catalytic membrane reactors for industrial use. They are working at laboratory scale with the current aim of making them suitable for industrial use and to investigate the economic viability of the approach.

Franke added: "We now want to make the leap from the laboratory to production. Only when we conduct investigations in the production environment, we can make statements about the suitability of the technology. We need to test whether the process is suitable for larger production volumes and if it will work stably over the long term."

By the end of 2022, the plan is to set up a demonstration plant under real, industrial conditions at the so-called Oxo plant at the Marl Chemical Park. 

There is expected to be a major impact on the sustainability balance of the reactions since the new membrane reactors separate the resulting product directly from other components. Traditional energy-intensive separation processes would be rendered unnecessary and the researchers hope to achieve an increase in energy efficiency of almost 70 per cent.

In hydroformylation, unsaturated hydrocarbons, or olefins, are converted to aldehydes using synthesis gas, a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. For the Performance Intermediates business line, aldehydes are intermediates on the way to higher alcohols, organic acids or esters, which are then used, for example, as plasticizers in plastics or as surfactants.