Honeycomb-shaped monolithic catalysts offer an attractive solution to the long-standing problem of balancing the reactor pressure drop with mass transfer in fixed-bed reactors. This approach is discussed in detail in this paper based on experimental and modeling data for the dehydrogenation. of ethylbenzene. to styrene. An extruded monolithic catalyst was found to be stable and active for the ethylbenzene dehydrogenation reaction. The pressure drop across the monolithic catalyst bed is about 20 times less than that of a packed bed of conventional 1/8 in. (3.2 mm) catalyst beads'. The low pressure drop nature of a monolithic catalyst makes it feasible to convert conventional radial flow reactors into simpler, axial flow reactor designs. Modeling results show that additional process performance improvements can be realized through novel reactor designs that take advantage of monolithic catalysts.