GUIDO BOGNOLO
Scientific advisory board of HPC Today – TKS Publisher

Abstract

Recent developments in the electrochemical synthesis of ethylene oxide seem to offer interesting perspectives for a highly selective industrial process, free of CO₂ emissions, where ethylene, water and electricity are the only consumables, and valuable Hydrogen can be recovered. Combined with another process generating ethylene from CO₂ the route CO₂ to ethylene oxide becomes conceivable. The article also highlights the progress possible with a clever use of existing knowledge.

In these columns I have repeatedly advocated the importance of recurring to the past to get inspiration for the future. Recently I came across two developments that seem to confirm, at least conceptually, that I may be right.

I refer to the full sustainable production of ethylene oxide (EO).

EO was first discovered by the French chemist Charles Adolphe Wurtz (1817-1884) in 1859 by dehydrochlorination of 1-chloro-2-hydrovyethanol (ethylene chlorohydrin), a process still occasionally used for laboratory synthesis.

EO has become a fundamental pillar of the chemical industry, used in a variety of applications: detergents, solvents, glycols and polyethylene glycols, medical equipments disinfection, thermobaric weapons. About 20 million metric tons of ethylene oxide per year are produced, by reacting ethylene and oxygen over a silver catalyst at temperatures of 200–300 °C and pressures up to 3 Mpa. Although the process is more cost-effective compared with other synthetic routes it is highly polluting: for each ton of ethylene oxide produced almost one ton of CO₂ is released to the environment, partly be ...