Mg-Al oxide supported Ni catalysts with enhanced stability for efficient synthetic natural gas from syngas

Abstract Mg-Al oxide supported Ni catalysts prepared by co-precipitation method for synthetic natural gas (SNG) from syngas methanation were developed. The properties of the catalysts were investigated by XRD, H 2 -TPR and nitrogen physisorption, etc. The catalytic syngas methanation activity tests showed that Mg-Al oxide supported Ni catalysts not only showed high activity at low reaction temperature (98.4% CH 4 yield at 250 °C) compared with Ni/MgO (97.0% CH 4 yield at 310 °C) but also showed an excellent thermal stability (maintained 95.2% CH 4 yield after reaction at 700 °C for 8 h) compared with Ni/Al 2 O 3 (12.4% CH 4 yield after reaction at 700 °C for 8 h). The XRD and nitrogen physisorption results indicated that the high catalytic activity of Mg-Al oxide supported Ni catalyst was related to the smaller Ni particle size compared with Ni/MgO, which attributed to the higher specific surface area of Mg-Al oxide than that of MgO. The XRD and H 2 -TPR results suggested that the excellent thermal stability of Mg-Al oxide supported Ni catalyst was ascribed to the stronger metal-support interaction in comparison with Ni/Al 2 O 3 . This study demonstrates that tailoring the composite oxide catalyst support properties is an effective way to develop high-performance catalysts for SNG from syngas.