Process of producing reduction products of carbon dioxide
We recently posted evidence that we have known, officially, in the United States, for more than sixty years, that we can recycle Carbon Dioxide into liquid fuels, through our presentation of US Patent 2467966, "Conversion of Hydrocarbons", which was issued to Oklahoma's Phillips Petroleum in 1949.
We have since learned that, even earlier, only nineteen years after Europe's Nobel Committee affirmed, through award of it's 1912 Prize in Chemistry to Paul Sabatier, that Carbon Dioxide could be effectively recycled into valuable products such as Methane, so did the United States Patent Office, through award of the enclosed United States Patent to a company based in Pittsburgh, PA.
We have little information on the "Selden Company", except that it was apparently founded by a one-time wealthy Pittsburgh family who had, for a while, interests in an automobile assembly plant in upstate New York - there was, for a few years, a "Selden" automotive brand - and, later, in steel and railroad car manufacturing in Bethlehem, PA.
Alphons Jaeger was, it seems, something of an itinerant inventor. Though this patent shows him as resident of Chicago, other of his industrial chemical engineering patents, assigned to larger corporations, such as American Cyanamid, declare him to live in Pittsburgh.
Comment follows very brief excerpts from:
"United States Patent 1,831,179 - Producing Reduction Products of Carbon Dioxide
Date: November, 1931
Inventor: Alphons Jaeger, Chicago
Assignee: The Selden Company, Pittsburgh
The invention relates to the process of preparing reduction products of carbon dioxide. More particularly, this invention relates to the catalytic reduction of carbon dioxide in the presence of hydrogen or hydrogen containing gases and catalysts."
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The full patent description is lengthy, and phrased too awkwardly for concise and clear summation.
However, the technology described by Jaeger seems to be a version of the bi-reforming, or tri-reforming, technologies we've earlier documented; wherein the Carbon Dioxide is reacted with "hydrogen containing gases", which could include Methane, which can itself be synthesized using Carbon Dioxide, to form, in a step-wise process, products including formaldehyde and methyl alcohol, i.e., Methanol.
If nothing else, the technology documented herein by our own US Government is just additional evidence that the opportunity exists to treat the Carbon Dioxide by-product of our Coal-use industry as a valuable raw material resource.
We don't have to allow ourselves to be taxed out of existence, via Cap & Trade, for producing it. Nor, do we have to allow ourselves to be enslaved to Big Oil through mandated, and ineffective, Geologic Sequestration to aid in secondary petroleum recovery.
We do have options. We should start exercising some of them.
