A Greener Way to Make Acetic Acid!

Our recent work on “Atomically dispersed ReOx/SiO2 catalysts for selective methanol carbonylation to acetic acid” has been published in Journal of American Chemical Society and featured in JACS spotlight!

Acidic acid is commonly produced via the reaction of methanol and carbon monoxide using a liquid system with an expensive organo-metallic catalyst (which must be recovered from the effluent stream) and a corrosive halide co-catalyst. By contrast, solid supported catalyst processes for making acetic acid typically suffer from low reactivity, selectivity, or stability. In this work, we have developed a novel supported catalyst process that shows promise for getting around these difficulties.