May 13, 2022

The Cost of Electrolytic Hydrogen from Various Sources of Primary Energy.

The current issue of Industrial Engineering and Chemistry Research is the "Hydrogen Economy Issue." It contains 12 papers; most issues of this journal, which I read, regularly have more than 30 to 40 papers. This I think is a good thing. The hydrogen cheers over the last half a century or so that I've been hearing them are all paeans to wasting energy.

Hydrogen on this planet is not a primary source of energy; never has been; never will be.

The fantasy that runs around is that we'll all have "renewable hydrogen" made with so called "renewable energy" but for 50 years of wild cheering, "renewable energy" remains a trivial form of energy; I sometimes doubt that all the wind and solar facilities on this planet could run all the servers and computers dedicated to saying how great it is.

There are many reasons besides the thermodynamic losses that consumer hydrogen is a bad idea; the material issue of hydrogen embrittlement in materials science is just one example. The ridiculously low viscosity is another, as is the ridiculously low critical temperature.

Almost all of the world's hydrogen today, as his been the case for well over a century, is made by the steam reforming of dangerous fossil fuels. Electrolytic hydrogen has risen in recent years to about 4% of the world's hydrogen, but it's still a minor contributor and the hysteresis associated with shut down and restart of electrolytic cells means that it is particularly a bad idea to shut it down when the sun goes down and/or the wind isn't blowing.

Nevertheless the fantasy never goes away, does it?

The opening article of the current 12 paper issue of Industrial Engineering and Chemistry Research, Vol 61, Iss 18 is this one:

The Hydrogen Economy Preface Lourdes F. Vega and Sandra E. Kentish Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research 2022 61 (18), 6065-6066.

I think it's open sourced.

First a little poetic color about defining the form of primary energy wasted to make hydrogen:

Now the cost:



There you have it folks. So called "green" hydrogen is about 800% more expensive than dangerous natural gas, which should not be surprising since overall on this planet, hydrogen is made by burning dangerous natural gas.

I know we all like to play pretend, and not hear what we don't want to hear, but reality bites.

I have hopes for thermochemical hydrogen as a captive intermediate, but no, that's not going to happen by trashing thousands of square miles with mirrors to make in flight bird fryers while playing Archimedes at Syracuse. It can only be done with reliable and sustainable energy and solar thermal ain't it.

Have a nice evening.

May 11, 2022

A Biomarker For Intellect?

Some years ago, I made fun of the concept of the measurement of "intelligence" at another website:

A Note on This Race and IQ Business.

I came across this article in one of my news feeds this morning:

Mila M. Paul, Sven Dannhäuser, Lydia Morris, Achmed Mrestani, Martha Hübsch, Jennifer Gehring, Georgios N. Hatzopoulos, Martin Pauli, Genevieve M. Auger, Grit Bornschein, Nicole Scholz, Dmitrij Ljaschenko, Martin Müller, Markus Sauer, Hartmut Schmidt, Robert J. Kittel, Aaron DiAntonio, Ioannis Vakonakis, Manfred Heckmann, Tobias Langenhan, The human cognition-enhancing CORD7 mutation increases active zone number and synaptic release, Brain, 2022;, awac011.

I actually don't have access to this journal for one reason or another, but the Abstract gives the flavor by noting that you and I are very much like flies:

There's that good ole' IQ again...

Maybe you want to tell me that you absolutely must have the R844H CORD7 mutation, just like the flies.

Don't get all worked up, maybe you don't want this mutation. It's associated with visual difficulties:

Samantha Johnson, Stephanie Halford, Alex G Morris, Reshma J Patel, Susan E Wilkie, Alison J Hardcastle, Anthony T Moore, Kang Zhang, David M Hunt, Genomic organisation and alternative splicing of human RIM1, a gene implicated in autosomal dominant cone-rod dystrophy (CORD7)☆, Genomics, Volume 81, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 304-314.

I do have access to this one. From the introduction:



If however, you have night blindness - my wife actually has a mild case of this - you can always tell me how much smarter you are than I am.

I won't argue.

See ya'...

May 11, 2022

Dawn Powell lived in Shelby, Ohio...

...wrote the novel "The Locusts Have No King," died in obscurity, donated her body to science, which, after use, an attempt was made to return it to the executor of her will, who refused it, whereupon it was buried in a Potter's Field.

There is no reason that you would need to know that, no reason you should care, but as you have read this, now you do in the unlikely case it ever comes up in conversation.

Life is beautiful and then you die.

May 9, 2022

In Memoriam: Babatunde Ogunnaike, 1956-2022

Back when my son was touring colleges, having heard from a friend that the University of Delaware gave great scholarships to excellent students and that the Materials Science Engineering Department was pretty good we visited the school to attend an engineering open house. (My son applied there and was accepted, but in the end the scholarship offered was not quite as good as many others),

I don't remember much about the tour other than the very moving speech that Dr. Babtunde Ogunnaike gave to the prospective engineering students around the theme of "If not you, then who?"

I did not know much about his work, but of all the speeches in college tours one hears, that one stuck in my mind.

He apparently has died:

In Memoriam: Babatunde Ogunnaike, 1956–2022 Phillip E. Savage Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research 2022 61 (16), 5365-5365.

Some text:

May 8, 2022

LaFeO3 Catalysts for the Oxidation of Nitrogen for Electrochemical Production of Ammonia from Air.

Recently in I have been considering the energy requirements for the zero discharge supercritical desalination of seawater, modeling the urban and agricultural demand for water in California as a tool for this relatively simple calculation to which I've chosen to add some level of complexity.

California and I got divorced nearly thirty years ago, but in my own way, I still love her, but some of what I loved was its spectacular ecology and vistas, many of which have been trashed for access to water and for access to industrial energy.

I view the water problem as a direct opportunity to restore, at least partially, trashed ecosystems.

Supercritical water is a very high energy substance, at temperatures in excess of 373°C, and pressures in excess of 22.1 MPa, and as I envision a process for its generation for the purpose of desalination, the side product would be continuously and reliably produced copious electricity. Electricity is, of course, a thermodynamically degraded form of energy, particularly when it is generated by the combustion of dangerous fossil fuels, as increasingly it is. This is true even for relatively efficient systems, for example combined cycle plants fueled by dangerous natural gas. The thermodynamic degradation of electricity is even worse when attempts are made to store in a chemical form, as in batteries or, for another example along the same terrible idea, as electrolytic hydrogen.

A caveat to the previous paragraph is that when electricity is generated in a process designed to capture entropic losses in heat engines as a form of exergy, which electricity is at least indirectly, it can actually improve thermodynamic efficiency, at least in the case where the electricity is utilized continuously at the time it is generated, foregoing energy storage. I am thus always interested in electrochemical processes where the purpose of the electrochemistry is not to store it, for example as hydrogen, but to rather in processes where it's use is either essential or where the alternatives are even more thermodynamically or materially questionable than electricity itself. Examples of such processes are the Hall-Heroult process by which all the world's aluminum metal is prepared from alumina, Al2O3, an extremely refractory process, as well as the FFC Cambridge process for the preparation of titanium and other metals. I also have interest in the electrochemical process for the preparation of elemental carbon about which I've written elsewhere in this space: Electrolysis of Lithium-Free Molten Carbonates. (In envision this process as a means to replace "Green" electrodes the Hall-Heroult process, which are made from petroleum coke, as well as FFC electrodes.) This electrochemistry, if applied to carbonates derived from air or seawater captured carbon dioxide might also displace – with some research – the carbon content in steel, thus usefully sequestering the element, essentially indefinitely.

It is because of this consideration, the need to recover exergy from thermal desalination via electricity generation that the following paper caught my attention:

Coupling of LaFeO3–Plasma Catalysis and Cu+/Cu0 Electrocatalysis for Direct Ammonia Synthesis from Air, Yi Cui, Hui Yang, Chengyi Dai, Pengju Ren, Chunshan Song, and Xiaoxun Ma Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research 2022 61 (14), 4816-4823.

The synthesis of ammonia, on which the current world food supply depends, is responsible, depending on one's source, for 1 to 3 percent of the world's energy supply. Currently the world demand for energy is on the order of 600 EJ/year; the Covid lockdowns in Shanghai and other Chinese cities may keep the demand below 600 EJ in 2022 as worldwide Covid lockdowns seems to have done in 2020. This means that the demand for Ammonia represents between 5 and 15 EJ per year, somewhere between the entire energy demand of Great Britain and that of Germany, the latter being largely dependent on Russian fossil fuel sources.

Ammonia is currently industrially synthesized using the Haber-Bosch process, which relies on the high temperature, high pressure catalytic hydrogenation of nitrogen gas. Despite some rather dubious enthusiasm for the fantasy that hydrogen might someday be produced by so called "renewable energy" via the thermodynamic and material nightmare of electrolysis - hydrogen is a currently a very dirty fuel, not that much of of it actually utilized as a fuel except in exotic situations hyped by people who seem not to understand the laws of physics well or at all. I noted elsewhere what the sources and uses of hydrogen are: The current sources and uses of hydrogen.

Here is a graphic from that post:



The caption:

Here is the graphic's source: Progress on Catalyst Development for the Steam Reforming of Biomass and Waste Plastics Pyrolysis Volatiles: A Review Laura Santamaria, Gartzen Lopez, Enara Fernandez, Maria Cortazar, Aitor Arregi, Martin Olazar, and Javier Bilbao Energy & Fuels 2021 35 (21), 17051-17084.

As we can see from the above graphic, hydrogen is a dirty fuel as it is at a minimum 96% dependent on fossil fuels dangerous fossil fuels for production - this at a thermodynamic loss - and depending on the source of electricity, which is also largely dependent on dangerous fossil fuels it may be even more dependent on them than is immediately obvious. (Electrolytic hydrogen is generally produced as a side product from the manufacture of elemental chlorine.)

The Dai and Ren paper under discussion is about the plasma production of fixed nitrogen followed by a electrochemical step. Every winter I attend lectures - except recent winters, lately they've been on line - at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. It would be disingenuous of me to criticize the hopes for fusion energy to which that national laboratory is mostly dedicated, but to the extent that it may become available (I won't object) or viable, it will be already too late to address the climate disaster, any more than the idiot fantasies of the members of Greenpeace spin about so called "100% renewable energy" "by such and such a year," even as people are dying today from extreme May heat in India and Pakistan.

Today.

Now.

This is why fusion energy will be too late because the climate disaster is underway now; it's on going.

Many of the winter lectures at the Princeton Plasma Physics labs are about all the wonderful things that plasma, a state of matter often referred to as the "4th State of matter" (there are arguably more than 4 states), can do besides run a fusion reactor. I do not recall that any I've attended have focused on the fixation of nitrogen, but in any case were such a lecture to be offered, it would not be about anything new. The nitrogen problem is an old one and was recognized as such - as a cause of soil depletion that, among many other things, famines for instance, that contributed to the outbreak of the American Civil War - early in the history of Chemistry. With the final acceptance of molecular theory, efforts got underway to try to make ammonia once people understood what it was. Mostly they failed. Early attempts to industrially fix nitrogen before the invention of the Haber-Bosch process that were marginally successful, albeit incredibly expensive, utilized electric spark methods; electric sparks are plasma. This is all described in a book I cannot recommend enough Vacslav Smil's Enriching the Earth, Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production. It is all about the work on the synthesis of ammonia from hydrogen and nitrogen that brought Haber the Nobel Prize and allowed Germany to fight the First World War despite the fact that British blockades prevented Germany from importing Chilean "Salt Peter," (potassium nitrate). This work also allowed humanity to grow beyond Malthusian limits to a population now just shy of 8 billion.

There are more modern methods than spark generation to produce nitrogen plasmas, there are a number of analytical chemistry instruments, for example, that work on "corona discharge" technology involving activated nitrogen, but none of them are used to fix nitrogen at anything competitive with the cost of the Haber Bosch process. The authors of the paper under discussion propose a new catalyst for the production of activated nitrogen plasma, lanthanum ferrate. Whether it would be competitive is not for me to say, but frankly, I'm rather disinterested in the plasma portion of this paper, but am very interested in the electrochemical portion.

The reason is this: At high enough temperatures - especially under pressure - nitrogen burns to form nitrogen oxides; nitrogen oxides are an important component of air pollution. The brown color of smog is, in fact, the color of NO2 gas.

All combustion cycles driven by dangerous fossil fuels produce nitrogen oxides, both in automobiles and trucks, particularly where diesel engines are involved but also in spark (Otto) engines, as well as in power plants. The purpose of catalytic converters - which are never 100% efficient - and the addition of urea to diesel exhaust, the so called "SCR," approach - is to remove nitrogen oxides. Jet engines, which are known as Brayton cycle devices produce nitrogen oxides as do the combustion chambers of dangerous fossil fuel heated Rankine cycle type power plants.

In the presence of water the nitrogen dioxide, the aforementioned NO2, disproportionates into NO gas and nitric acid; the NO gas is rapidly oxidized back to NO2 by oxygen. The net reaction for the formation of nitric acid, a component of "acid rain," in which NO gas is catalytic, is 4NO2 + 2H2O + O2 ? 4HNO3. This is the basis of the Ostwald process for the production of nitric acid from ammonia. The reaction between ammonia is the basis of the widely utilized fertilizer ammonium nitrate which the terrorist Timothy McVeigh used to blow up the Murrah building in Oklahoma. (No one ever called for the banning of agriculture because ammonium nitrate can be diverted to weapons of mass destruction.)

For reasons of high thermodynamic efficiency, the process I imagine for for supercritical water desalination begins not with the heating of seawater, but rather the heating of pressurized air, precisely the conditions under which nitrogen "burns." For a long time I thought about how to address the resultant nitrogen oxides by utilizing approaches to catalysis rather like those utilized in Otto and Diesel internal combustion engines, but this is unsatisfactory in the sense that it wastes fixed nitrogen which takes energy to make and is thus a useful material. One can imagine a closed system under these conditions in which the electrochemical reduction of nitrate and nitrite, formed respectively by the addition of water to nitrogen oxides might be reduced to a useful product.

Shortly I will quote the paper's introduction.

Before doing so, I'd like to make a brief note on the nature of citing papers in connection with a personal issue. If one cites a paper, it does not follow that one agrees either with the contents of the paper or even with the paper's goals. I mention this because recently an abysmal idiot with whom I have a rather unhappy relationship in this space punctuated by ignoring his or her ignorance on and off, commented in one of my posts that I must have Alzheimer's disease because I was mocking a paper I cited in the OP to, um, mock. One sees these sorts of things, and one really doesn’t believe it. Regrettably the comment was removed for violating DU rules, which is sort of sad (but understandable) when someone, not me, alerted on it. Personally I guiltily enjoy it when idiots display idiocy.

The paper in the post was about the issue of flowback water used to frack for dangerous natural gas - a process I oppose in all manifestations - and which the abysmal idiot in question apparently needed to defend, since so called "renewable energy" depends wholly and totally on access to dangerous natural gas and/or other dangerous fossil fuels.

I mention this because, although I think that in many ways, this is a fine paper, there are several points in the introduction with which I decidedly disagree although I suspect that one of them is merely an obeisance paid to what is becoming a culturally universal faith, albeit it one hardly grounded in reality.

The quote from the introduction:



My first objection to the statements herein is that ammonia is a terrible fuel as a "hydrogen carrier" because it is even more dangerous than hydrogen itself; it's only advantage being that it is easily liquified. Many chemists have worked with liquid ammonia and they need to be trained to do so. It boils readily at room temperature releasing a caustic gas that will quickly either blind people painfully, badly damage their lungs and/or kill people. Although it avoids the huge energy penalty associated with the liquefaction of hydrogen that makes adds to the waste of energy and environmental degradation that hydrogen production entails, and is slightly less dangerous from an explosion and leak perspective from hydrogen resulting from hydrogen embrittlement of metals, it is no less unacceptable than hydrogen. The idea of using hydrogen or ammonia as a consumer product borders on insane in my view, although neither of these dumb ideas ever seem to go away.

My second objection is the statement that so called "'renewable energy sources such as wind and solar has emerged as a potential alternative in recent years." This kind of statement is often included in scientific papers these days but on reflection, it's not even close to being "science," so much as a quasi-religious genuflection at the nonsense belief that solar and wind are meaningful and/or sustainable forms of energy. They are not. They have failed, and failed miserably to address climate change and all the wishful rhetoric to the contrary is clearly nonsense. After more than 50 years - more than half a century - of cheering for these forms of energy they produced, as of the 2021 Edition of the International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook, just 10.4 Exajoules out 587 Exajoules consumed by humanity in 2020, this a Covid lockdown year in which for the first time in recorded history energy demand fell, albeit clearly temporarily. The material and land requirements of the solar and wind industry render them immediately unsustainable, particular with matter and energy wasting systems like the batteries people fall all over themselves to praise in contempt for all future generations. We have spent well over 3 trillion dollars on this stuff in this century for no result other than this:

May 06: 419.61 ppm
May 05: 419.68 ppm
May 04: 421.33 ppm
May 03: 420.48 ppm
May 02: 420.99 ppm
Last Updated: May 7, 2022

Recent Daily Average Mauna Loa CO2

These things are facts. Facts matter, no matter how much wishful thinking and squirming they may produce.

One advantages of the side product of supercritical water desalination being excess electricity is that it will allow for the restoration of wilderness in California - over 1500 square miles of wilderness as of this writing - out of the wind industries industrial parks and allow for the dismantling of that horrible in flight bird fryer at Ivanpah. It is the land requirements for so called "renewable energy" that makes it unsustainable; it is the material (mining) requirements that makes the word routinely attached to it, "renewable" absurd and frankly, a lie.

Despite these statements in the introduction, I think this paper is a valuable one because it addresses the high energy cost of ammonia production even if the Haber Bosch process has approached it's theoretical limits. Most of this energy, as the paper notes, is connected with the need to overcome the energy barrier of breaking NN triple bonds. This is nicely shown by the energy level diagram for the nitrogen and nitrogen-oxygen species contained in the paper:



The caption:



It is worth noting that in this energy diagram the activation energy for the production of monoatomic N, reflecting the energy cost of breaking the NN triple bond, is similar in scale to that of breaking the bond in the Haber-Bosch process, which also involves surface chemistry - the catalyst. The N2* refers to the non-thermal plasma. In the process I imagine for SCW desalination the gas phase energy is a side reaction. This said, if the goal of the process is to produce ammonia, however, one can also irradiate the air with gamma rays or x-rays, a source of which might be isolated fission products.

I note that lanthanum is a fission product, but all of its radioactive isotopes are short lived, with the exception of that found naturally, La-138, which has a half life of 0.1 trillion years. After a few weeks, allowing for the decay of La-140 (half-life around 1.68 days) lanthanum isolated from used nuclear fuel would be less radioactive than natural lanthanum, since La-138 does not form to an appreciable extent in nuclear fuels as it is neutron poor. Thus one would need another element as a gamma source to produce N2* radiolytically.

A note on NO: In the presence of oxygen and water, NO gas can react to form nitrous acid, HNO2, as well as nitric acid HNO3. Absorbed into water in a system in which ammonia is being generated, ammonium nitrite will form. Ammonium nitrite is unstable and spontaneously can decompose to nitrogen gas and water. Thus the reaction efficiency is somewhat lower than it is for NO2's reaction to form nitric acid. As the Oklahoma City tragedy perpetrated by the early right wing terrorist Timothy McVeigh showed, ammonium nitrate can also explosively decompose if activated, which McVeigh did by diverting a dangerous fossil fuel, diesel fuel, to a weapon of mass destruction, but in general ammonium nitrate in contrast to ammonium nitrite can be handled and shipped as it often is. It is an important fertilizer on which our food supply depends. Under the right conditions, this electrochemical process can make it without the high temperature and high pressure systems associated with the long practiced industrialized Haber Bosch process.

I have ignored much of the interesting content of the paper in this post, but it's a good one, I think.

From the author's conclusion:



I will be celebrating Mother's Day today with the woman of my dreams, who chose to allow me two magnificent sons. I am grateful to have her as a friend, a lover, a friend, and as the parent of my boys. If you are celebrating Mother's Day in some capacity, I wish you a happy one; otherwise I wish you a wonderful afternoon.

May 7, 2022

As we prepare ourselves for the Supreme's theocracy, reference to other human sacrifice for "faith."

I'm not crazy about the New York Times "science" reporting, but this article caught my eye:

They Thought the Skulls Were Murder Victims’. They Were Off by Centuries.

It's probably behind a fire wall - in spite of my better judgement I subscribe to the NY Times - but an excerpt:



I added the bold.

Apparently 5 members of the Supreme Court worship tissue in women's bodies so much that they are willing to sacrifice the women themselves, raped women, poor women, just women, and the reason they are willing to make this sacrifice is because while the 1st Amendment precludes Congress from establishing a state religion, they feel the Supreme Court is allowed to establish a State religion, apparently one not all that distant in its view of women than that practiced in Mexico about 1000 years ago.

In this country, the enemy of the Constitution is the group of illegitimate thugs established on the Supreme Court by the racist, sexist thug Mitch McConnell, who violated the precedent set by none others than John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, when Jefferson and Congress accepted as perfectly legitimate the appointment (by Adams) of the precedent setting great Chief Justice John Marshall at the very end of Adam's term.

The idea that the modern day American Taliban - aka the "Republican" party - loves our country and its constitution is obscenely laughable.

We need to fight, and fight hard.

May 6, 2022

Interesting new lipophilic extractant for trivalent actinides.

Regrettably I don't have much time to discuss this paper that I just came across. For the essential reprocessing of used nuclear fuel, our last, best hope of doing anything about climate change, it is important to recover the minor actinides, specifically neptunium, americium and curium because of their very special nuclear properties, only one of which is for proliferation resistance.

I'm not a PUREX kind of guy, but currently the world's most common nuclear reprocessing is accomplished using this process or a variant thereof.

I'm an electrochemical separations kind of guy, and one interesting approach that I think needs advancement is electrochemically driven membrane separations, for which traditional extractants have some value in continuous flows in conducting ionic liquid membranes. (I see the world slowly moving in this direction.

The paper that caught my eye: is this one: Promising Lipophilic PyTri Extractant for Selective Trivalent Actinide Separation from High Active Raffinate Annalisa Ossola, Eros Mossini, Elena Macerata, Walter Panzeri, Andrea Mele, and Mario Mariani Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research 2022 61 (12), 4436-4444


An excerpt:

This 370,000 MT of used nuclear fuel has tremendous clean energy value - the energy density of plutonium is 80 trillion joules per kg - without requiring additional mining, and consists of many extremely valuable components beyond the actinides, some of which are happily highly radioactive.

Here is the structure of this new interesting extractant which suggests many modifications that might make an ionizable form for ion transport:



The caption:



Nice actinide/lanthanide separation factors:



The caption:



We can save the world if we open our minds and stop chasing unicorns.

Esoteric but cool, in particular as the paper is out of an Italian institution and Italy is an officially anti-nuke country.

Happy Friday...

May 6, 2022

The turnaway study: Longitudinal study of the denial of abortion rights.

It was referenced in this weeks Nature.

The Turnaway Study

May 5, 2022

Yes, science can weigh in on abortion law.

This is a "World View" article in Nature. It dates before the reactionary decision about to be announced by the Taliban dominated Supreme Court that was politicized by the racist sexist thug McConnell enabled by liars including Susan Collins.

Yes, science can weigh in on abortion law

Subtitle:

Diane Green Foster, Nature, November 16, 2021.

I believe it's open sourced, but here are some excerpts:

May 5, 2022

File for "very long term," zircon supported catalysts for the transfer hydrogenation of bicarbonate.

In general, I oppose biofuels because of the massive destruction of critical ecosystems, as I remarked recently in a post here: The Very Stable Genius of Biofuels.

Nevertheless, they exist and in one case, the case of biodiesel, they have led to a glut of the simplest triol glycerol.

It does seem to me that algal biodiesel might have some potential to be marginally sustainable, possibly as a side product, as a tool to recover phosphorous from eutrophic zones, particularly in the case where waste or deliberate heat was sustainably available. In this more sustainable case, glycerol would still represent a glut.

I'm not going to spend very much time at all on the paper I'll reference here, if for no other reason that transfer hydrogenations have always struck me as cool. Here it is: Ru/ZrO2 as a Facile and Efficient Heterogeneous Catalyst for the Catalytic Hydrogenation of Bicarbonate Using Biodiesel-Waste Glycerol as a Hydrogen Donor Wubin Yan, Binbin Jin, Jiong Cheng, Xiaoyu Shi, Heng Zhong, and Fangming Jin ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering 2022 10 (17), 5374-5383.

This brief note is a placeholder, should it ever be possible to make sustainable biodiesel - it will never be as clean a diesel fuel as DME but it may have a role to increase lubricity - something which is currently not viable from an environmental standpoint.

From the introduction to the paper:

I have time to post only one graphic from the article, a graphic on the mechanism:



The caption:



The products are lactate - utilized in certain biopolymers used widely in medical applications - formate and dihydroxyacetone (which rearranges to give lactate.)

Cool paper. Like I said, I like transfer hydrogenations.

Ruthenium is a relatively rare and expensive metal, but it can be recovered from used nuclear fuel in significant quantities as it is a prominent fission product. Zirconium, the support, which is less rare is also a fission product as well as a widely used structural component of nuclear reactors.