Objective. Subclinical gut inflammation has been demonstrated in patients with ankylosing spondylitis (AS).Intestinal inflammation is a shared feature of ankylosing spondylitis (AS) and Crohn's disease (CD). Shared immunologic and genetic similarities, in both clinical and preclinical stages, and the observation that 7% of patients with AS and initial chronic gut inflammation develop overt CD strongly support the hypothesis that AS patients with more pronounced gut inflammation could be considered to have preclinical CD (1-3).We have recently demonstrated that overexpres-

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A new, fully integrated process has been designed to evaluate the feasibility of the CO 2 methanation reaction according to the Sabatier reaction. This approach has two environmental advantages: (i) the conversion of CO 2 into a regenerated fuel or platform chemical and (ii) the chemical storage of H 2 to allow its long-range transport using a well-established distribution network. Two kinetic models for the Sabatier reaction, reviewed from the literature, were used to design a multistage plug-flow reactor. The outflowing gas was then purified from unreacted CO 2 and water, and proper recycles were foreseen to achieve an overall 100% conversion of CO 2 , given that, without water or methane withdrawal, at least four reactive stages are needed to get >75% conversion. Either adiabatic or cooled catalytic beds can be used, operating at atmospheric pressure below 400 °C. This methanation process was set to a size of 10 5 Nm 3 /day of synthetic methane. Process simulation under steady-state conditions was used to calculate the stream compositions and the inner reactor thermal profile (9.2 MW, as determined by the reaction heat). The dehydration of the produced methane was accomplished by pressure-swing adsorption over a commercial basic zeolite and dynamically simulated. All the foreseen vapor−liquid equilibria have been carefully revised from literature data in order to establish the separation sections on a firm basis. Two further calculations were given for the main energy recovery options and a possible downstream liquefaction.