Designing the right protection

Olefins are used to manufacture our everyday essentials, including plastics, detergents, and hand sanitizers. Olefins are conventionally produced from crude oil cracking, but environmental concerns drive the urgent search for alternative, more sustainable carbon feedstocks. Carbon-containing waste streams ranging from biomass to industrial carbon dioxide (CO2) to municipal waste are increasingly explored for the synthesis of chemicals and fuels (1, 2). These waste streams may first be converted to carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrogen (H2) called synthesis gas or syngas. The gas is further converted to olefins. Because the waste streams may be contaminated with impurities, catalysts with higher resistance to poisons would be advantageous for these processes. On page 610 of this issue, Xu et al. (3) report iron catalysts that are particularly suitable for this task owing to their robustness and the low selectivity toward CO2 and methane (CH4).