Preliminary study of activated carbon as support catalyst for low cost methanol production from biomass syngas

Energy demands have increased substantially over the last decade and consequently alternative energy sources are becoming a greater necessity. Therefore researchers are focus-sing on the development of processes and technologies that are environmentally-friendly, whilst ensuring reasonable standards of living throughout our world. Biomass is one of the more important potential sources for the production of synthetic fuels and energy. Biomass syngas as the intermediate product of utilization biomass to liquid fuel, bio-methanol. In recent times, methanol production has been significantly augmented in energy and chemical industries as it is an essential molecule for chemical synthesis and other utilities such as clean transportation fuel. The assessment of methanol production for low cost was conducted by catalyst that has been developed. The role of the catalyst is the key to achieve optimal conditions through lower activation energy. Focus of this work has developed low cost catalyst for methanol synthesis. The catalyst of methanol synthesis was prepared by impregnation method of Cu and Zn with activated carbon as a support catalyst. The as-synthesized catalyst was then characterized using XRD, XRF, SEM-EDX, and BET. The result of XRD showed the catalyst has the same component (Cu, Zn) with crystallite diameter of CuO is 36.87 nm. The result of the SEM showed catalyst was collected on one site, but still in the relatively good distribution. From the BET surface area analyzer, the catalyst synthesized has higher surface area (433.2 m2/g) than commercial catalyst (64.75 m2/g). The catalytic activity of Cu/ZnO/Activated-Carbon catalysts in methanol production from syngas were preliminary tested and compared with that commercial one. The result showed that hence the catalytic activity of Cu/ZnO/Activated-Carbon catalysts througth impregnation methode was still inferior 1.12% yield methanol) compared to commercial one (1.26 % yield methanol), they were potential to be used as catalyst in the methanol production from syngas.