MOSCOW (
MRC) -- Siluria Technologies announced it is developing an efficient and economic process to convert natural gas into value-added chemicals, used by industry and also manufactured into thousands of everyday products, said
Prnewswire.
Backed by some of the world's leading venture capital firms, Siluria is a San Francisco Bay Area start-up. Siluria is working on a proprietary catalytic process for the direct conversion of natural gas, the world's most abundant petrochemical feedstock, into ethylene, the world's largest commodity chemical. Siluria's success will enable a novel, economically attractive pathway to produce existing chemicals and fuels.
"While the world's access to oil supplies is becoming more expensive, the natural gas resource base continues to grow," explains Dr. Alex Tkachenko , president of Siluria. "Our goal is to convert methane, the principal component of natural gas, directly into ethylene, the fundamental building block of the chemical industry. Ethylene and its derivatives, such as polyethylene, are in thousands of everyday products, including tires, medical devices, cosmetics, food packaging, anti-freeze, paints, appliances, and liquid crystal displays."
Ethylene is the largest global commodity chemical, with 140 million tons used annually in an industry worth USD160 billion per year. Today, ethylene is produced via steam cracking, a mature technology that consumes more energy than any other chemical process, uses valuable oil resources, and is the largest contributor to greenhouse emissions in the chemical industry.
Siluria's catalyst synthesis technology is based on the innovative discoveries of MIT Professor and Siluria founder, Dr. Angela Belcher . Dr. Belcher's synthetic technology produces inorganic materials in the same way nature makes them: with a bottom-up, versus a conventional, top-down synthetic approach.
Siluria's technology application is to grow nanowire catalysts with unique surfaces, structures and shapes. This synthetic approach offers improved ways to manipulate catalyst surfaces. Novel surfaces have the potential for improving catalyst performance in structure-sensitive reactions. Under license from MIT, Siluria is developing catalysts that are robust, stable at high temperature, and compatible with the existing petrochemical industry infrastructure.
As MRC
wrote earlier, Siluria successfully raised USD 30 million in a round led by Russia-based Bright Capital and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen"s Vulcan Capital. Besides, existing venture capital investors like Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, also contributed. In all the company raised USD 63.3 million.
MRC