A new catalyst?

Interesting news -- should be very cool if it actually scales up. From Science Daily:

Coal-to-diesel Breakthrough Could Drastically Cut Oil Imports
Professor Alan Goldman and his Rutgers team in collaboration with researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have developed a way to convert carbon sources, such as coal to diesel fuel.

This important advance could significantly cut America's dependence on foreign oil -- what President Bush called "an addiction" in his 2006 State of the Union address. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, our 286 billion tons of coal in the ground translate into energy reserves 40 times those of oil.

If this is starting to sound vaguely familiar, it should as it is. They are using the Fischer-Tropsch process invented in the 1920's but with an interesting twist:

"The key to energy independence in the next five decades is Fischer-Tropsch chemistry, amended and enhanced," said Goldman, a professor in the department of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. "The study of catalysts, the little molecular machines that control chemical reactions, is my field. With our new catalysts, one can generate productive, clean burning fuels with Fischer-Tropsch, economically and at unsurpassed levels of efficiency."

This discovery is reported in the April 14 issue of the journal Science by Goldman and his colleagues. The work grew out of a National Science Foundation-funded research consortium, the Center for the Activation and Transformation of Strong Bonds, based at the University of Washington.

Fischer-Tropsch yields a wide distribution of molecular weight hydrocarbon products but without any way to control the desired mix. The molecular weight is the weight of a molecule of a substance, or the sum of the weights of all atoms in the molecule. The low-weight and the high-weight Fischer-Tropsch products are useful -- the light as gas and the medium-heavy as diesel fuel, Goldman explained.

"The problem -- the greatest inefficiency of the process -- is that you also wind up with a substantial quantity of medium-weight products that are not useful and you are stuck with them," Goldman said. "What we are now able to do with our new catalysts is something no one else has done before. We take all these undesirable medium-weight substances and convert them to the useful higher- and lower-weight products."

This is interesting but there are some fundamental problems that are not addressed with the new catalysts. There is a lot of CO2 produced, the process takes a lot of energy to run so it is horribly inefficient and there is a lot of clinker ash left over after the coal is partially oxidized and degassed. A very cool breakthrough but I do not see it scaling up to commercial levels of power generation though. It will be a great source of petroleum feedstocks for plastics production while we are waiting for the nuclear fallout in the Middle Eastern oil-fields to die down a bit (did I just say that?) but we really need to be looking at Nuclear Power as the real option for the future.