During 2011 CH4 gas was 7 times cheaper than liquid hydrocarbons per amount of produced energy. Thus there is a strong value to creating liquid hydrocarbons from CH4 Many approaches use catalysts, this is a new kind of CH4 to liquid hydrocarbon catalyst

Many catalytic materials work most efficiently at particular temperatures as well as pressures. Studying pressure, researchers have compared the US diamond anvil technology with the former Russian superbaric hydraulic technology. The Russians made a gigantic hydraulic machine to research the effect of high pressure on chemistry, the US researchers just used a microsample between two diamond plates to achieve higher pressures while keeping a viewable reaction. (link)

Now use semiconductor fabrication technology to create a million or billion variably sized microchambers on silicon, silicon nitride, or diamond coated silicon nitride at a flat disk or semiconductor style wafer Then create a second disk or wafer with the complementary impressing shapes of varied sizes. >] When sandwiched together with CH4 these million or billion diamond pressure chambers will first describe the optimal pressure regime to do catalysis while a wide variety of deposited possible catalysts are measured as to their effectiveness at a million or billion chemical variations. This technology rapidifies catalyst research tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands times more rapidly than 2oth century approaches.

When they find some catalysts that work particularly well the diamond disks may be used to catalyze ch4 to liquid hydrocarbons at production, a vibrating system where billions of microtechnology near nanotechnology micropressure reactors like > ] with the right coating of catalyst could actually be used to make the liquid hydrocarbons right at the well, which greatly improves energy portability.

A vibrating scroll compression technology similar to two metal vinyl LPs could continually microcompress the ch4 at the catalyst at bulk to produce hydrocarbon liquids

The main benefits are finding better catalysts with mass screening, then creating a cheap way to convert CH4 to liquid hydrocarbons at ocean gas wells greatly increasing the amount of liquid hardocarbons available
-- beanangel, May 11 2012

[beanangel], this may seem like a personal question but if you are then it won't be too upsetting, I imagine.

... Are you some kind of Turing machine? A bot that gathers unrelated snippets of prose from, say, conspiracy theory sites, and then arranges it into "ideas" it then posts?
-- UnaBubba, May 11 2012


That notion has been proffered before, along with several others. So far, the [beanangel] has yet to address such allegations, and stoically endures our abuse while coming back time after time with ill-conceived fever dream concepts premised mostly upon mad science magazine articles or obscure DARPA projects that he doesn't fully understand. Once in a while there's a real gem buried in there, and it's entertaining to poke fun at him while searching for it.

This one is actually somewhat lucid and remarkably ingenious. I sincerely doubt it would work (I'm eagerly waiting for the resident chemists to weigh in), but it's ingenious nonetheless, and it doesn't involve any wiggly magnetics or quantum photons, which is a plus.
-- Alterother, May 11 2012



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