Technology development for iron Fischer-Tropsch catalysis. Quarterly technical progress report, October--December, 1994

Fischer-Tropsch catalysts must undergo a pretreatment in order to be active. As part of the authors comprehensive study to maximize the activity of iron based precipitated Fischer-Tropsch catalysts, they are currently attempting to optimize the activation procedure. Although they are able to achieve high activity using CO pretreatment, the catalysts tend to deactivate suddenly and rapidly after 500 hr of synthesis. Kolbel reports high CO conversion comparable to these results at a lower gas flow (2.4 vs. 3.4 nL/hr-g(Fe)); however, he achieved greater stability with conversions reported to be 90% after 1,400 hrs. One possibility for Kolbel`s higher stability could be due to the activation procedure. Herein are reported the initial results of a study to optimize the catalyst composition and the operating conditions for the iron based slurry phase Fischer-Tropsch synthesis when synthesis gas activation is utilized