Sustainable production of benzene from lignin

123Citations
Citations of this article
142Readers
Mendeley users who have this article in their library.

This article is free to access.

Abstract

Benzene is a widely used commodity chemical, which is currently produced from fossil resources. Lignin, a waste from lignocellulosic biomass industry, is the most abundant renewable source of benzene ring in nature. Efficient production of benzene from lignin, which requires total transformation of Csp2-Csp3/Csp2-O into C-H bonds without side hydrogenation, is of great importance, but has not been realized. Here, we report that high-silica HY zeolite supported RuW alloy catalyst enables in situ refining of lignin, exclusively to benzene via coupling Bronsted acid catalyzed transformation of the Csp2-Csp3 bonds on the local structure of lignin molecule and RuW catalyzed hydrogenolysis of the Csp2-O bonds using the locally abstracted hydrogen from lignin molecule, affording a benzene yield of 18.8% on lignin weight basis in water system. The reaction mechanism is elucidated in detail by combination of control experiments and density functional theory calculations. The high-performance protocol can be readily scaled up to produce 8.5 g of benzene product from 50.0 g lignin without any saturation byproducts. This work opens the way to produce benzene using lignin as the feedstock efficiently.

Cite

CITATION STYLE

APA

Meng, Q., Yan, J., Wu, R., Liu, H., Sun, Y., Wu, N. N., … Han, B. (2021). Sustainable production of benzene from lignin. Nature Communications, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-24780-8

Register to see more suggestions

Mendeley helps you to discover research relevant for your work.

Already have an account?

Save time finding and organizing research with Mendeley

Sign up for free