On January 4, China Petroleum Engineering & Construction Corp. (CPECC) successfully commissioned the country's first thousand-ton-scale natural gas-to-carbon nanotube production line, which it designed and built.

This production line was jointly developed through collaborative efforts by three entities: China Petroleum Engineering & Construction Corp., Natural Gas Sales Company, and Jidong Oilfield Company. It boasts five major advantages: large-scale production, intelligence, low energy consumption, zero emissions, and low cost. Its designed annual production capacity is 1,000 tons of carbon nanotubes and over 300 tons of hydrogen.

Since the project's initiation in 2022, the R&D team led by CPECC Southwest Company successfully overcame technical bottlenecks over two and a half years, including the industrial preparation of highly active catalysts, the design of large-scale reactors, and full-process resource recovery. They developed a complete set of technologies for "producing carbon nanotubes from natural gas cracking with hydrogen as a by-product." To date, the project has resulted in 2 process packages, 5 core technologies, and 1 enterprise standard, with 6 patents filed. It has also established the first green and intelligent thousand-ton-scale carbon nanotube production line, offering a new pathway for the high-value utilization of natural gas and the development of the carbon-based new materials industry.

Carbon nanomaterials, known for their high strength, high toughness, and excellent electrical, thermal, and optical properties, hold broad application prospects in cutting-edge fields such as materials science and nanotechnology. The completion of this production line not only overcomes the limitations of traditional carbon nanotubes, such as high cost and small production scale, but also achieves a dual upgrade by enabling the simultaneous production of carbon nanotubes and hydrogen as a by-product from natural gas—turning natural gas from a mere fuel into both a "raw material and an energy source."

From:SunSirs