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Methane upgraded by rhodium

Rhodium catalysts have been developed that can be tuned to produce two different products from methane. The findings could aid the development of industrial processes that exploit this abundant resource.
  1. Ive Hermans

    1. Ive Hermans is in the Department of Chemistry, and the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, USA.

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Methane is an underused resource, in part because technologies for converting it into more-valuable chemicals are highly underdeveloped, presenting a major challenge for chemists1,2. On page 605, Shan et al.3 address this challenge by reporting rhodium catalysts that promote the oxidation of methane to either methanol (CH3OH) or acetic acid (CH3COOH). The optimized catalytic systems provide mechanistic insight into these reactions, which might inform the development of industrial processes for preparing useful products from methane.

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Nature 551, 575-576 (2017)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-017-07437-9

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