Re: "The Only Thing They Learn" -- does anyone else find it irritating?

On Sat, 21 Jun 2008 04:56:22 GMT, throopw@xxxxxxxxx (Wayne Throop) wrote:

: John Schilling <schillin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
: Gasoline, or even just methanol, is a synthesis reaction.

Yes. Yes it is. And supposedly it can be done for methanol by running
a methanol fuel cell in reverse.

Supposedly it can. Actually, nobody seems to know how to do it.


http://thekneeslider.com/archives/2006/05/08/the-methanol-economy/

The methanol fuel cell takes methanol and produces electricity with
water and CO2 as byproducts. What's neat is that you can
reverse that process and take water and CO2 and with a bit of
electricity, produce methanol.

http://www.fuelcellsworks.com/Supppage4673.html

The second approach involves carbon dioxide. We were co-inventors
of the direct methanol fuel cell. This fuel cell uses methanol and
produces CO2 and water. It occurred to us that maybe you could
reverse the process. And, indeed, you can take carbon dioxide and
water, and if you have electric power, you can chemically reduce it
into methanol.

I don't google where I originally saw the idea, which mentioned that
it's not been done on an industrial scale (or even modest real uses),
and the conversion efficiency wasn't all that great (iirc), but still,
a been-demonstrated-in-the-lab capability.

Been demonstrated in which lab?

Both of your references cite George Olah; his lab used to be across the
street from mine, his accomplishments were quite loudly touted in the
area, and I don't recall that one. Could be something recent, but:

Both of your references are Olah hawking the same book, "Beyond Oil and
Gas: The Methanol Economy", Olah, Goeppert, and Prakash, 2006. So,
fairly recent. And when we read the book, we find only one reference
to the concept. Chapter 11, page 196:

"Regenerative Fuel Cell: A regenerative fuel cell based on methanol/
formic acid fuel cells has also been proposed[158]. The key to the
success of such an approach is efficient capture of CO2 and its
electrochemical reduction to either HCOOH or CH3OH in high current
efficiencies. Intense research to achieve efficient electrochemical
reduction of CO2 is currently under way in many laboratories."

We can further track down that reference 158. It points to US Patent
5,928,806, "Recycling of Carbon Dioxide to Methyl Alcohol and Related
Oxygenates for Hydrocarbons", Olah and Prakash, 1999. Cool. That
must be where they describe how it's done.

Except, reading the patent, it describes and claims the *concept*, not
the mechanism. No mention of catalysts, electrode materials, membranes
for all the rest. But when someone does figure out how to make it
actually work, please send a check to George Olah. In the meantime,
buy his book, and learn how to restructure our economy so that when
someone else figures out how to make it work we can all send lots of
really big royalty checks to George Olah.

Actually, that's not fair. As chapter 12 of his book elaborates, he
wants us to restructure our economy to use methanol produced in lots
of other ways, with reversible methanol fuel cells not even on the
list, and most of them not patented by Olah.


A brief survey of the secondary references, and of Olah's other recent
publications, doesn't seem to indicate him or anyone else having ever
actually run a methanol fuel cell in reverse, even in the lab, and
gotten methanol as an output.


Probably Olah's right and it can be done. Maybe even it can and will
be done cheaply on an industrial scale, someday.

But the proposal that if we'd had free electricity two years ago, we'd
all be burning cheap methanol rather than expensive gasoline today,
really doesn't hold up to examination. That one, there are actual
technical rather than "merely" economic barriers.


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