Suppressing Dehydroisomerization Boosts n-Butane Dehydrogenation with High Butadiene Selectivity

Butadiene (BD) is a critical raw material in chemical industry, which is conventionally produced from naphtha cracking. The fast-growing demand of BD and the limited oil reserve motivate chemists to develop alternative methods for BD production. Shale gas, which mainly consists of light alkanes, has been considered as cheap raw materials to replace oil for BD production via n-butane direct dehydrogenation (n-BDH). However, the quest for highly-efficient catalysts for n-BDH is driven by the current drawback of low BD selectivity. Here, we demonstrate a strategy for boosting the selectivity of BD by suppressing dehydroisomerization, an inevitable step in the conventional n-BDH process which largely reduces the selectivity of BD. Detailed investigations show that the addition of alkali-earth metals (e. g., Mg and Ca) into Pt-Ga2O3/S10 catalysts increases Pt dispersity, suppresses coke deposition and dehydroisomerization, and thus leads to the significant increase of BD selectivity. The optimized catalyst displays an initial BD selectivity of 34.7 % at a n-butane conversion of 82.1 % at 625 degrees C, which outperforms the reported catalysts in literatures. This work not only provides efficient catalysts for BD production via n-BDH, but also promotes the researches on catalyst design in heterogeneous catalysis.