Recent advances in process and catalyst for CO2 reforming of methane

CO2 (dry) reforming of CH4 (DRM) reaction is an attractive measure to not only mitigate the environmental problems such as global warming but also produce the syngas as feedstock for liquid fuel production. Great achievements have been made in various DRM processes such as thermally-driven DRM, plasma-assisted DRM and solar-driven DRM together with the corresponding catalyst design strategies. Herein, the merits and demerits of these three processes as well as these design strategies are compared and analyzed. We start with thermally-driven DRM which accounts for the large majority of researches being reported in the recent five years (2016–2020). Four typical measures to achieve sintering and carbon resistant catalysts including designing catalysts with strong MSI, bimetallic catalysts, layered doubled hydroxide catalysts and core shell structured catalysts are summarized. Thereafter, for plasma-assisted DRM, the effect of operating parameters to the performance of classical plasma reactors as well as the influence of different packing materials for these packed plasma reactors are analyzed. After this, for solar-driven DRM, the application and design of solar reactors are discussed for solar thermocatalysis, which is followed by the discussion of solar photocatalysis and hybrid photothermo catalysis. Finally, we propose potential challenges and research directions of these three processes to give a comprehensive understanding of DRM reaction.