Nafen potential in Oil & Gas industry

The environmental pressure and industry demands that petroleum companies experience today are forcing the oil & gas industry to explore innovative solutions for the optimization of costs and implementation of ‘Cleantech’ processes.

NAFEN™ has enormous potential in various disciplines from Oil & Gas drilling, to the Production and Processing/Refining of petrochemicals. Today, NAFEN™ already offers superior corrosion resistance via enhancement of widely used anti-corrosion coatings used on oil-production equipment (pipes, drills, plugs, etc), thus reducing maintenance costs and downtime.

But even more important, a special modification of the nanofiber structure makes it possible to use NAFEN™ as an effective adsorbing material. In a similar way, it could provide novel approaches to improved catalytic production processes by boosting certain chemical reactions and reinforcing catalyst carriers. The small diameter of the fibers, high specific surface area, and activity associated with the specific structure of the nanoparticles strongly enhances catalytic properties and increases the potential for use of NAFEN™ on a massive scale as a catalyst with high selectivity.

For example, one of the noble metals, palladium, has a strong catalytic activity for hydrogenation, hydrogenolysis and oxidation reactions. Such palladium catalysts on the basis of alumina nanofibers support have already been successfully tested for NO reduction, CO oxidation, and other processes.

Moreover, NAFEN™ alumina nanofibers are perfect candidates as catalyst supports in heterogeneous catalytic reactions. As a catalyst-support structure, NAFEN nanofibers can provide a means of constructing catalytic systems that are efficient, lightweight, thermally & chemically stable, and with the large surface area.