MACBETH project

The MACBETH project is an innovation action project, funded by the European Commission in the Horizon 2020 initiative (Grant agreement ID: GA 869896). The goal of the project is to validate the industrial applicability of membrane reactor technology through the long-term operation of demo plants for the processes of hydroformylation, hydrogen production from steam reforming and propylene production via propane dehydrogenation at technology readiness level 7. In addition, the consortium aims to transfer this technology to biotechnology, in the selective enzymatic enrichment of omega-3 fatty acids.

The MACBETH project is an innovation action project, funded by the European Commission in the Horizon 2020 initiative (Grant agreement ID: GA 869896). The goal of the project is to validate the industrial applicability of membrane reactor technology through the long-term operation of demo plants for the processes of hydroformylation, hydrogen production from steam reforming and propylene production via propane dehydrogenation at technology readiness level 7. In addition, the consortium aims to transfer this technology to biotechnology, in the selective enzymatic enrichment of omega-3 fatty acids.

Project overview

The M.A.C.B.E.T.H. (acronym of Membranes And Catalysts Beyond Economic and Technological Hurdles) consortium includes 27 different partners among universities, companies and research institutes. The project started on November 1st, 2019 and it is expected to be concluded on October 31st, 2024. It has a total estimated cost of about 20.5 million euro, of which 80% have been provided by the European Commission. The project has been proposed by the consortium to address the topic of downstream processes, which refers to the recovery and purification of products in process industry. Due to the high energy consumption typically associated with downstream processes, the idea of the project was to demonstrate the potentialities of a very broad applicable concept for an efficient integration of downstream operations in the overall process chain. In particular, combining the catalytic synthesis and the separation units in a single reactor, called membrane reactor. The idea to substitute, in some application, a complex chain of downstream processes with a small, single, highly-efficient reactor lays under the concept of process intensification, which is any engineering development that allows to produce a certain product in a cleaner, safer and more efficient way. To achieve this, the MACBETH consortium combines the catalytic synthesis step with the separation step via tailor-made catalysts and membranes, designing the membrane reactors and demonstrating their performance through long-term operations.

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