Enabling high-turnover methanol-to-syngas reforming

Carbon-based feedstocks, including oil, coal, and natural gas, are essential raw materials for the chemical industry. This makes the transition away from fossil resources challenging compared to energy and transportation sectors. Renewable methanol has emerged as a promising liquid C1 platform that could provide a drop-in route to synthesis gas (syngas), a central intermediate in large-scale chemical production. However, homogeneous methanol-to-syngas reforming is typically performed in closed batch reactors, where accumulation of gaseous products rapidly suppresses catalytic turnover. Here we report a continuous flow system for homogeneous methanol-to-syngas reforming using Ru-MACHO-based catalysts that overcomes these limitations through continuous separation of gaseous products from the catalytic phase. Systematic optimisation using a design-of-experiments strategy identified the key operational parameters governing productivity, while ligand design enabled improved catalyst stability under flow conditions. The resulting system enables sustained syngas generation over extended operation and delivers substantially enhanced catalytic performance relative to batch operation. These findings demonstrate how combining reactor operation with molecular catalyst design can unlock new operating regimes for equilibrium-limited homogeneous catalytic transformations.