Finding economical ways to utilize the enormous worldwide reserves of methane (CH4) is of great interest towards increasing this clean energy resource. Low temperature direct methane conversion has shown significant promise in the past decade. Using ionic liquids could be the key to a commercial process for converting natural gas to methanol. We will present our recent findings of using ionic liquid to facilitate methane conversion in new ternary systems of inorganic Pt salts and oxides, and ionic liquids under different solution condition. One of our new ionic liquid systems shows significant improvement over the current methane to methanol process.

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