Pavel Hrabanek

INTERVIEW

Please introduce yourself and your role in the project!

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My name is Pavel Hrabanek and I am working as the research and development and sales manager at RANIDO headquarters in Prague, Czech Republic. My role is to coordinate the project tasks that are assigned to RANIDO and help to achieve the project goal. But RANIDO's specialty is in the field of industrial catalysis and process technology, with a focus on catalyst development and also on catalyst custom manufacturing. So that is the role that we are having in the ēQATOR project.

How did you learn about the project and become a partner?

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As to my knowledge, RANIDO was invited to participate in ēQATOR as a catalyst provider and developer. So that we have the experience and that was the reason that we have been invited to participate and  what we are thinking about that the resistive heated and microwave heated catalytic reactors, they have really great potential. converted to biogas into syngas with especially with the improved efficiency.

 

What is your organisation's role in the project, and what expertise do you bring to the table?

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RANIDO’s expertise is to be the catalyst provider and developer, and for us is also very interesting how this project would be using new technology. All these heated microwave-heated catalytic characters are completely new. It's very interesting and the best part is that the integration of catalysts and reactors with up to 90% reduction of reactor size is really impressive. And also what is interesting for us is that the reduction in the catalyst is the volume up by 50 to 75%. It's also impressive for us. We also think, as a small company, that we really needed some process intensification and that future technology needs to at least go in the direction of cost savings, especially for environmental sustainability.

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How is your organisation collaborating with other partners in the project?

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We are very close collaboration with with Andrew Steel’s team from Johnson  Matthey, also Yves Schuurman’s team from CNRS. Also Christian and Steve from SINTEF, Elias Klemm from University of Stuttgart, Lukas Moltner from MCI and Heinrich Bertold from Keramik Innovation Berthold. So this is where we are included. We are participating in the Work Package 2, working on the tasks 2.1, 2.3, 2.4, and our roles, I would say, are widely spread between the catalyst development for different reactions, the upscaling of the shaped catalyst beads and extrudates, also, including this newly designed for microwave heating and resistive-heated catalysts. And also we have some cooperation in the work package 5 for their studies.

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How do your project activities contribute to the goal of the project to achieve a cost-competitive renewable methanol production with near zero CO2 emissions?

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By developing catalysts that would be sustainable, stable, which is also ordered and reliable. That is our role, those are the activities that we are contributing to and we strongly believe that renewable power sources for industrial production, especially from renewable carbon sources, could really reduce carbon dioxide emissions significantly. The implementation is estimated to decrease the life cycle CO2 emissions for syngas production by 60 to 80%. Very impressive target.

Regarding your tasks, what do you expect are or will be the greatest challenges during the project?

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We have been discussing the results between the different partners. The optimization of reforming catalysts that would meet the estimated order required methane or CO2 conversion alongside with the catalytic performance, especially for long-term use. So this will be the greatest challenge, the optimization of catalyst formula. What we've seen so far, it's quite challenging and we are doing our maximum effort to always put new ideas, to do feedbacks that we are having from the different partners.

The integration of the perspective catalyst, especially with the microwave heated and arrested here, has resistive-heated reactors. The challenges are regarding the microwave heating catalyst, fortunately, only one part of the catalyst is active, and therefore, a small microwave penetration is not a problem.

If you had one wish regarding the project, what would it be?

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We have a couple of wishes on this subject. The first one is that we want to provide new high performance catalyst to the market. To have this business model. And it would be interesting to have the production of how and possibility to apply for a patent and to keep the catalyst formula to be tradable as a license and protected. What is also important and is our wish is that we would like to have more insightful information on the coke formation. This is very interesting and important, especially under realistic dry reforming conditions, so we are really looking forward and we are interested in the in situ mass analyzer because it has got a great potential to study the kinetics of carbon formation on the catalyst, and especially to see what is the influence of water addition. And of course, the greatest RANIDO’s wish is to hand over, or at least to work on the project for the better, technology for our children. We can give them technologies that are on some other level and they can work to tackle other environmental problems that are relevant to them. So this is one of the technologies that I'm very proud to be part of. Proud that this technology will be further researched and will have some impact.