Monday, June 18, 2007

The Utility of Light: Getting Real with the Existing Energy Infrastructure.

Warning: Spoiler dead ahead!

He starts this post with Joni Mitchell, rambles for a couple thousand words and surprises with:

"Over the last several years I have been visiting a book in a certain library near here. The name of the book is Carbon Dioxide Chemistry: Environmental Issues. (Ed. Jan Paul Pradier and Claire Marie Pradier, Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, 1994.) Here you can read about the thermodynamics of the hydrogenation of carbon dioxide to give methanol, for instance and discover that the Gibbs free energy of this reaction is - 9.1 kJ/mol, meaning that if you put a bunch of hydrogen and a bunch of carbon dioxide in a vessel and went away for a long time, maybe a few million years, when you came back, most of the carbon dioxide would be converted to methanol. If you don't want to wait for millions of years, you can add a catalyst, say one containing ruthenium supported on a mixture lanthanum oxide and nickel.

Don't do this at home. It generates a lot of heat, this reaction, and you might start a fire."
(about halfway down the page)

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