Scientists find new way to upgrade natural gas

Discovery may impact natural gas use in the US

2014-03-13

(Press-News.org) America's current energy boom may take a new direction thanks to the discovery of a new way to turn raw natural gas into upgraded liquid alcohol fuel.

In the March 14 issue of Science magazine, chemists from Brigham Young University and The Scripps Research Institute detail a process that could reduce dependence on petroleum.

The most unexpected breakthrough in the paper was that ordinary "main group" metals like thallium and lead can trigger the conversion of natural gas to liquid alcohol. The research teams saw in experiments that natural gas to alcohol conversion occurs at 180 degrees Celsius – just a fraction of the heat needed with traditional "transition metal" catalysts (1400-1600 degrees Celsius). The BYU team was crucial in using theory to understand how and why this process works at low temperatures and under mild conditions.

"This is a highly novel piece of work that opens the way to upgrading of natural gas to useful chemicals with simple materials and moderate conditions," said Robert Crabtree, a chemistry professor at Yale who is familiar with the new study.

The discovery comes at a time when natural gas production is booming in America – a trend that is expected to continue for the next 30 years. The new process actually cuts out one step of the process for fuel production. Ordinarily the three main parts of raw natural gas – methane, ethane and propane – are separated before they are turned into fuels or other useful chemicals.

"Hardly anybody actually tries to do reactions on a genuine mixture that you would get from natural gas," said Daniel Ess, a BYU chemistry professor and one of the study authors. "Turns out we can just directly use the mixture of what comes out of natural gas and convert all three of them together."

The potential benefits aren't limited to the production of fuel, Ess said. Many chemicals derived from natural gas, such as methanol, are also important in manufacturing.

"Whether you use methanol to burn as a fuel or as a chemical commodity for products, this process cuts down energy usage," Ess said.

This happens to be the second time in 2014 that Ess has seen his research appear in Science, which consistently ranks as one of the top two scientific journals in the world. In January the journal published another paper he co-authored about synthesizing molecular compounds. This semester he's also teaching organic chemistry to 150 undergraduate students at BYU.

INFORMATION:

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Stumbling fruit flies lead scientists to discover gene essential to sensing joint position

2014-03-13

LA JOLLA, CA—March 13, 2014—Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have discovered an important mechanism underlying sensory feedback that guides balance and limb movements. The finding, which the TSRI team uncovered in fruit flies, centers on a gene and a type of nerve cell required for detection of leg-joint angles. "These cells resemble human nerve cells that innervate joints," said team leader Professor Boaz Cook, who is an assistant professor at TSRI, "and they encode joint-angle information in the same way." If the findings can be fully replicated ...

A novel battleground for plant-pathogen interactions

2014-03-13

Scientists at The Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, with collaborators at Michigan State University and the University of Illinois, have unveiled a new way in which plants perceive pathogens to activate immunity. They also show how pathogens inhibit the mechanism to cause disease. It was previously only associated with other processes in mammalian cells. When plants detect microbial molecules, they trigger immune responses to prevent disease. Although several plant immune receptors for these microbial molecules are known, how they are activated once the microbe is recognised ...

When big isn't better: How the flu bug bit Google

2014-03-13

Numbers and data can be critical tools in bringing complex issues into crisp focus. The understanding of diseases, for example, benefits from algorithms that help monitor their spread. But without context, a number may just be a number, or worse, misleading. "The Parable of Google Flu: Traps in Big Data Analysis" is published in the journal Science, funded, in part, by a grant from the National Science Foundation. Specifically, the authors examine Google's data-aggregating tool Google Flu Trend (GFT), which was designed to provide real-time monitoring of flu cases around ...

More to biological diversity than meets the eye

2014-03-13

Most of us already imagine the tropics as a place of diversity—a lush region of the globe teeming with a wide variety of exotic plants and animals. But for researchers Andrew Forbes and Marty Condon, there's even more diversity than meets the eye. In a paper published in the March 14 issue of the journal Science, Forbes and Condon report the discovery of extraordinary diversity and specialization in the tropics. The paper builds upon previous research conducted by Condon, who discovered surprising diversity while researching plant species in South America. Later, she, ...

Saving large carnivores in the ecosystem requires multifaceted approach

2014-03-13

Carnivore management is not just a numbers game, Virginia Tech wildlife scientists assert in response to an article in the Jan. 10 issue of the journal Science that urged "minimum population densities be maintained for persistence of large carnivores, biodiversity, and ecosystem structure." "This type of approach may fail in social carnivore species," said Kathleen Alexander, an associate professor of fisheries and wildlife conservation in the College of Natural Resources and Environment. "Predator management is incredibly complex and we need to be extremely cautious ...

Unraveling a mystery in the 'histone code' shows how gene activity is inherited

2014-03-13

Cold Spring Harbor, NY – Every cell in our body has exactly the same DNA, yet every cell is different. A cell's identity is determined by the subset of genes that it activates. But how does a cell know which genes to turn off and which to turn on? While the genetic code carried in our DNA provides instructions for cells to manufacture specific proteins, it is a second code that determines which genes are in fact activated in particular cell types. This second code is carried by proteins that attach to DNA. The code-carrying proteins are called histones. Today, researchers ...

Understanding how mountains and rivers make life possible

2014-03-13

Favorable conditions for life on Earth are enabled in part by the natural shuttling of carbon dioxide from the planet's atmosphere to its rocky interior and back again. Now Stanford scientists have devised a pair of math equations that better describe how topography, rock compositions and the movement of water through a landscape affects this vital recycling process. Scientists have long suspected that the so-called the geologic carbon cycle is responsible for Earth's clement and life-friendly conditions because it helps regulate atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, ...

Deficient protein GM-CSF production found to impair gut's immune tolerance

2014-03-13

New York, NY – The protein GM-CSF plays a critical role in maintaining immune tolerance in the gut, with defects in the protein increasing the susceptibility to inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), according to a new mouse study by a team of researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. IBD is a severe intestinal disease characterized by chronic intestinal inflammation that results from a dysregulated immune response to microbes and food antigens. Writing in the peer reviewed journal Science published online March 13, 2014, the research team writes that this ...

Stirring the simmering 'designer baby' pot

2014-03-13

(Garrison, NY) From genetic and genomic testing to new techniques in human assisted reproduction, various technologies are providing parents with more of a say about the children they have and "stirring the pot of 'designer baby' concerns," writes Thomas H. Murray, President Emeritus of The Hastings Center, in a commentary in Science. Murray calls for a national conversation about how much discretion would-be parents should have. "Preventing a lethal disease is one thing; choosing the traits we desire is quite another," he writes. He discusses public hearings two weeks ...

Roomy cages built from DNA

2014-03-13

VIDEO: To create supersharp images of their cage-shaped DNA polyhedral, the scientists used DNA-PAINT, a microscopy method that uses short strands of DNA (yellow) labeled with a fluorescent chemical (green) to... Click here for more information. BOSTON, March 13, 2014 – Move over, nanotechnologists, and make room for the biggest of the small. Scientists at the Harvard's Wyss Institute have built a set of self-assembling DNA cages one-tenth as wide as a bacterium. The structures ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology: Higher doses of semaglutide can safely enhance weight loss and improve health for adults living with obesity, two new clinical trials confirm