ABSTRACT
In consequence, conversion of natural gas (NG) into value added chemicals and fuels has become increasingly important for petrochemical industry, which has noticed the opportunities for new business and technologies, i.e., how to efficiently produce value added higher hydrocarbons from light alkanes. This chapter discusses NG electrochemical conversion to direct conversion of light alkanes based on the solid oxide electrochemical cell (SOC) technology, which is an emerging technology and attracts great technoeconomic interest from petrochemical industry. The direct conversion of natural gas into higher hydrocarbons has obvious advantage over the indirect way, as it simplifies the production procedure without producing syngas. The proton source was found to be either from conversion of hydrogen generated from dehydrogenation of ethane or from electrochemical conversion of ethane. Despite the increase in the research of NG electrochemical conversion, data related to the different steps of scale-up is still missing.
