The novel surface pretreatment is successfully developed to strengthen the adherence of catalyst via the oxidative formation of the uniform metal oxide layer on the metal substrate, which plays an important role as a binder between metal substrate and catalyst layer. The developed pretreatment method can be applied without regard to shape and composition of metal support. The surface pretreated metal structured catalysts are adopted to the natural gas steam reforming, showing a CH(4) conversion of 82% and stability for 120 h at high GHSV of 31,000 h(-1), while conventional metal structured catalysts quickly deteriorates. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.