VATIS UPDATE Article

Chemists at the USC Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute, the United States, have devised a way to produce and store hydrogen from methanol, without concurrent production of either carbon monoxide (CO) or carbon dioxide (CO2), by trapping it in organic derivatives of ammonia called amines. The re-search has been published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Senior author G. K. Surya Prakash, 1994 Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner George Andrew Olah, and their team at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, the United States, have outlined a carbon-neutral method for doing just that, with a little help from the simplest alcohol known to man: methanol.

The well-known steam reforming process usually used to extract hydrogen from methanol, called the methanol reformer, traditionally produces CO and CO2 as part of this extraction process. CO2 is a greenhouse gas (GHG) that causes global warming and ocean acidification. The research demonstrated that just one more way carbon has been freed from the cycle of creating and storing fuels via methanol.