Zhao et al.
[14] prepared hierarchically structured porous flower-like materials such as La
2O
3-H- and Sr-doped (Sr
0.1LaO
x-H) compounds and highly dense non-porous (La
2O
3-D and Sr
0.1LaO
x-D) microspheres. The porous materials showed higher catalytic performances in OCM than non-porous catalysts, presumably due to the creation of the active sites in porous materials, which could enhance the activation of oxygen. Sr
0.1LaO
x-H showed better OCM results than La
2O
3-H and reached the optimum selectivity (~48%) and C
2 yield (~19%) at 550 °C due to Sr isolating the active sites of the catalyst, which can act as a strong basic site. However, deactivation occurred in the Sr
0.1LaO
x-H catalyst during OCM in ~30 h, but adding a small amount of Zr can produce better stability in OCM. Lopes et al.
[15] prepared La
2Ti
2O
7-based catalysts (LaTi
1−xMg
xO
3+δ) with varied Ti/Mg molar ratios through the partial substitution of Ti by Mg to regulate the quantities of alkaline sites and surface oxygen species, properties crucial for OCM reaction. The characterization data testifies that alkalinity and the surface oxygen vacancy concentration increase as Mg increases. The presence of high amounts of Mg on the surface can increase the incidence of defective sites in the interface formed by La-O-Mg. In general, the rich defects are active and selective toward C
2 production in the OCM reaction. Hence, the catalytic results showed that methane conversion and C
2 selectivity increased as a function of the Mg amount, and also this catalyst exhibited high thermal stability after 24 h on stream. Sato et al.
[16] proposed that, in the presence of an electric field, the CePO
4 nanorod catalysts showed high activity and stability even at low temperatures for OCM (C
2 yield = 18%) without any external heating. Because, in the electric field, these catalysts can be produced and regenerate the surface-active oxygen species even at low temperatures, which are mainly responsible for OCM, Schmack et al. proposed a meta-analysis method. It is often useful ascertain the links between a catalyst’s physicochemical characteristics and its performance in an OCM reaction
[17]. Pirro et al.
[18] proposed the process simulator and illustrated it for the OCM to determine the catalyst-dependent kinetics for industrial implementation. For the case study, the feeding of oxygen and cooling were operated under a multi-stage adiabatic configuration. Three catalysts (Sn-Li/MgO, NaMnW/SiO
2 and Sr/La
2O
3) were introduced to estimate the methane conversion and C
2+ yield compared to a single stage. They revealed that multi-phase configuration is advantageous compared to a single phase.