Cong-Yan Chen of Chevron is the recipient of the 2020 F. G. Ciapetta Lectureship in Catalysis

I am pleased to announce that Dr. Cong-Yan Chen of Chevron is the recip­i­ent of the 2020 F. G. Cia­pet­ta Lec­ture­ship in Catal­y­sis. Dr. Chen is also an adjunct pro­fes­sor in the Depart­ment of Chem­i­cal Engi­neer­ing at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia at Davis. The award is admin­is­tered by the North Amer­i­can Catal­y­sis Soci­ety and spon­sored by the W. R. Grace & Co. It is to be award­ed bien­ni­al­ly in even-num­bered years. The award con­sists of a plaque and an hon­o­rar­i­um of $5,000. The recip­i­ent may be invit­ed to lec­ture at some of the local catal­y­sis clubs dur­ing the two-year peri­od cov­ered by this award.

Dr. Cong-Yan Chen’s research for over 25 years at Chevron cov­ers var­i­ous areas in the field of fun­da­men­tal and indus­tri­al catal­y­sis includ­ing syn­the­sis and char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of micro­p­orous and meso­porous mol­e­c­u­lar sieves, struc­ture-prop­er­ty rela­tion­ships of zeo­lites, adsorp­tion, dif­fu­sion and reac­tion mech­a­nisms. The work has had an empha­sis on inven­tion and devel­op­ment of cat­alyt­ic appli­ca­tions of zeo­lites and oth­er cat­a­lysts in refin­ing and petro­chem­istry. He and his group devel­oped sev­er­al cat­alyt­ic process­es of indus­tri­al impor­tance. In one exam­ple, alka­ne dis­pro­por­tion­a­tion is applied in upgrad­ing or elim­i­nat­ing liq­uid petro­le­um gas (LPG, con­sist­ing of propane and butanes) at remote loca­tions, with the tar­get of inte­grat­ing the result­ing ethane into nat­ur­al gas and blend­ing the result­ing C5+ liq­uid into crude oil while sav­ing the trans­porta­tion and stor­age facil­i­ties for LPG. It pro­vides an eco­nom­ic and envi­ron­men­tal­ly benign process more attrac­tive than com­plex com­bi­na­tions of oth­er exist­ing tech­nolo­gies. Dr. Chen’s work has been pio­neer­ing in the devel­op­ment of borosil­i­cate zeo­lites in the area of aro­mat­ics cre­ation and trans­for­ma­tions in the petro­chem­i­cals sec­tor. In anoth­er exam­ple, a nov­el renew­able base oil tech­nol­o­gy is trans­lat­ed into com­mer­cial val­ue via zeo­lite catal­y­sis, rais­ing the lubri­cants’ per­for­mance to the next lev­el with envi­ron­men­tal ben­e­fits and resource sus­tain­abil­i­ty.
 
Con­grat­u­la­tions!
 
Jing­guang Chen
Pres­i­dent, North Amer­i­can Catal­y­sis Soci­ety