Ethylene is a basic product for many applications in the petro- chemical industry. It is used as an intermediate to produce valuable chemicals, mostly ethylene oxide (EO) and polymers such as polyethylene (PE), polyethylene terephthalate (PET), and polyvinyl chloride (PVC). The thermal cracking process, which employs petroleum fractions and natural gas liquids as feedstocks, is a dominant method for large-scale ethylene production worldwide. Significant attention to ethylene production by the catalytic dehy- dration of bioethanol has been paid recently. Since 2007 several Brazilian companies have announced their plans to start polymers production (PE, PVC) on a large-scale from renewable bioethanol [1]. Due to increasing of oil prices, bioethanol dehydration process could be regarded as cost competitive to thermal cracking. More- over, it is a promising technology in producing high purity ethylene from renewable biomass resources.
Generally, the ethanol dehydration process is conducted in the vapor phase in fixed bed or fluidized bed reactors over alumina or silica–alumina catalysts [1–4]. The process is strongly endothermic. Depending on the used catalyst, the ethanol dehydration process
takes place at the temperature range between 240 and 450 ◦ C. The
costs of the process strongly depend on the ethylene yield because of its direct impact on raw ethylene purity and purification stages required to produce polymer grade ethylene.
In the literature there are many papers related to the design of ethanol dehydration catalysts capable of providing the high ethy-