At 12:49 AM 3/7/5, Michael Foster wrote: >--- On Sun 03/06, Jones Beene < [EMAIL PROTECTED] > wrote: > >> Imagine how the average German citizen would react if they >> were to learn that - in the tens of billions of euros which >> they send to Russia for the purchase of natural gas (being a >> rather anti-nuclear country), that some of that gas comes >> via H2 from a nuclear-produced deep fracture zone where H2 >> is produced from water and then converted to methane by the >> reverse version of the Haber processes they invented in >> WWII. > >How is this a reverse version of the Haber process? Which >process was invented during WWI, not WWII, by Fritz Haber, >not "them". > >M.
I suspect the process to which Jones refers may be the steam-hydrocarbon process. The Haber process created ammonia from hydrogen and methane: N2 + 3 H2 -> 2 NH3 The process achieved this at about 550 deg. C and 200 atmopheres presure in the presence of a catalyst made of iron oxide with small amounts of cerium and chromium. Before 1930 the process by which the hydrogen was obtained to feed the Haber process was primarily the water-gas process in which steam was reacted with coal or coke to produce synthesis gas which includes hydrogen. After 1930 hydrogen was also obtained from methane using the steam-hydrocarbon process originally developed by the Standard Oil Company, though not in Germany I think. This was accomplished using nickel catalyst filled metal tubes heated to about 871 deg. C. Regards, Horace Heffner
