ChBE Professor and C2B2 Executive Director Al Weimer recently received a $380K grant from the Energy Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E) for his proposal "Atomic Layer Deposition for Creating Liquid Fuels from Natural Gas".
Weimer proposes to use nanotechnology to improve the structure of gas-to-liquids catalysts, increasing surface area and improving heat transfer compared to current catalysts. The new structure of these catalysts would be used to create a small-scale reactor, for converting natural gas to liquid fuels, which could be located at remote sources of gas.