Unreactive? Oh, I beg to differ!
After being fed cheese snacks, my dog can produce copious amounts of methane. You should see the reactions of anyone in the room at the time.
Posted on 08/18/2016 10:55:22 AM PDT by Red Badger
(Phys.org)—A team of researchers from Belgium and the U.S. has identified the active site of an iron-containing catalyst that has raised hopes for designing a practically useful catalyst that might make converting methane to methanol a possibility. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the researchers describe their efforts, what they discovered and why they believe their findings may lead to a practical way to convert methane to a more efficient energy resource. Jay Labinger, with the California Institute of Technology offers a News & Views piece outlining the work done by the team in the same journal issue.
Scientists would very much like to find a way to convert methane (the primary component in natural gas) to methanol at room temperature. Doing so would offer a new source of liquid fuel that would be readily available due to the abundance of methane. Unfortunately, researchers have found it difficult going due to the unreactive nature of methane. In this new effort, the researchers report on progress they believe they have made in achieving that goal.
As Labinger reports, that progress has come in two forms. The first was developing an aid for picking out the active site of a heterogeneous catalyst from a host of candidates. The second involved creating a design for converting methane to ethanol that would be both efficient and achievable at room temperature.
To create their design, the team looked at an iron-containing structure generated via a zeolite (a type of mineral) that had been reported back in 1997. Since that time, researchers have used various techniques to ascertain that such structures contain another structure known as the α-Fe(ii) center, an important component in converting methane to methanol at room temperature. The new design involved proposing a means of describing a structure with an unusual monometallic iron center. They then conducted experiments using Mössbauer spectroscopy that indicated they were on the right track, which could lead eventually to finding the catalyst they are seeking.
The finding by the team is good news, Labinger suggests, though he cautions that it is unlikely that the same approach could be used for solving other catalytic problems.
Abstract An efficient catalytic process for converting methane into methanol could have far-reaching economic implications. Iron-containing zeolites (microporous aluminosilicate minerals) are noteworthy in this regard, having an outstanding ability to hydroxylate methane rapidly at room temperature to form methanol. Reactivity occurs at an extra-lattice active site called α-Fe(II), which is activated by nitrous oxide to form the reactive intermediate α-O; however, despite nearly three decades of research, the nature of the active site and the factors determining its exceptional reactivity are unclear. The main difficulty is that the reactive species—α-Fe(II) and α-O—are challenging to probe spectroscopically: data from bulk techniques such as X-ray absorption spectroscopy and magnetic susceptibility are complicated by contributions from inactive 'spectator' iron. Here we show that a site-selective spectroscopic method regularly used in bioinorganic chemistry can overcome this problem. Magnetic circular dichroism reveals α-Fe(II) to be a mononuclear, high-spin, square planar Fe(II) site, while the reactive intermediate, α-O, is a mononuclear, high-spin Fe(IV)=O species, whose exceptional reactivity derives from a constrained coordination geometry enforced by the zeolite lattice. These findings illustrate the value of our approach to exploring active sites in heterogeneous systems. The results also suggest that using matrix constraints to activate metal sites for function—producing what is known in the context of metalloenzymes as an 'entatic' state—might be a useful way to tune the activity of heterogeneous catalysts.
Journal reference: Nature
Good news for us old farts!
Meth = bad. We need Methane to ethane to ethanol. Mix in peat moss and smoke and you’ll be good to go.
You beat me to it. Does this include Fraternity Pledge Farts?
Does that mean we could strap on some device to a cow’s butt that would store methanol that could be released “on tap”?
This would be a tremendous advance in fuels if it could be achieved.
A catalytic converter for cows !
Unreactive? Oh, I beg to differ!
After being fed cheese snacks, my dog can produce copious amounts of methane. You should see the reactions of anyone in the room at the time.
so that’s how the cow jumped over the moon.
But Fraternity Pledge Farts sually get burned by the pledges doing time honored experiments to see if they will burn, a practice often resulting in burned under pants and singed posteriors, a phenomenon I personally observed many years ago.
IIRC a gallon of gasoline is equal to two gallons of methanol in how far it can power an automobile.
I think my uncle Dwayne qualifies as a room temperature containment structure when he is on his bean and beer diet—so possibly my family’s energy problems are solved if we can get him to stand still next to the converter.
That's about right. The big advantage that I see for this is that the methane that's currently being flared at remote oil wells can be converted to methane and hauled away in trucks. This could make methane a whole lot cheaper than it is now, which is distilling it from "corn squeezin's".
NO Methanol is poison . It is wood alcohol you drink that you go blind & die which is not a good thing for a person to do.
Thanks. So an automobile’s methanol fuel tank has to filled more often. This guy has been talking up methanol from all sources to be used for transportation. Robert Zubrin. I liked what he said but with low oil/gasoline prices no one will listen.
from 2011>>>
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/284560/methanol-wins-robert-zubrin
First, I ran the car on 100 percent methanol. This required replacing the fuel-pump seal made of Viton, which is not methanol compatible, with one made of Buna-N, which is. The new part cost 41 cents, retail. In order to take proper advantage of methanol’s very high octane rating (about 109), I advanced the timing appropriately. This dramatically improved the motor efficiency and allowed the ordinarily sedate sedan to perform with a significantly more sporty spirit. As measured on the dyno, horsepower increased 10 percent. With these modifications complete, I took my Cobalt out for a road test. The result: 24.6 miles per gallon.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/284560/methanol-wins-robert-zubrin
These results should not be too surprising. Methanol contains about half the energy content of gasoline, but its high octane allows it to be burned more efficiently, and thus obtain two-thirds of the mileage. The fact that the Cobalt could easily be made to use it should be no shock either: While not a flex-fuel car, the Cobalt uses the same E-37 computer and the same engine as GM’s HHR, which is a flex-fuel car. In fact, all GM cars sold in the U.S. for the past five years use either the E-37 (for small cars) or the equally flex-fuel-capable E-38 (for larger cars), and so all are capable of flex-fuel operation provided they are programmed correctly. The same is true at Ford, whose cars, whether flex-fuel or not, indiscriminately use the same “black oak,” “green oak,” or “silver oak” computers. Without question, the same must be the case for European and Japanese cars as well, since all are sold in Brazil, where flex-fuel capability is mandatory.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/284560/methanol-wins-robert-zubrin
Gives me an idea for a future Olympic sport.
Let's see what Mr. Zurbin thinks after 200,000 miles.
Very good refutation! I never took any of that into account. A methanol automobile can be built, its just that its more complicated than swapping out a few parts as Zubrin thinks.
You nailed it! Indy 500 cars do quite well on alcohol. Just don't count on them for much more than 500 miles, and don't plan on taking one to the grocery store in the next blizzard.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.