- Person
- George Olah
- Lived
- 1927–2017
- Field
- Organic chemistry
- From
- Hungarian-American
The story
George Olah was born to Jewish parents in Budapest in 1927, survived the last months of the Second World War in hiding, and fled Hungary as a refugee after the 1956 revolution. By the time he received the 1994 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on carbocations, he was one of the world’s leading experts on hydrocarbons, the molecules of oil, gas and coal.
That expertise led him to a worry. Fossil fuels are finite, and burning them releases carbon dioxide that warms the planet. In his later years at the University of Southern California, working with his colleague Surya Prakash, Olah proposed an alternative that he called the methanol economy. Methanol, the simplest alcohol, is a liquid that is easy to store and transport. It can be burned in engines, used in fuel cells to make electricity, or converted into ethylene and propylene, and from those into petrol, diesel, plastics and medicines.
The key step in Olah’s plan was where the methanol would come from. Rather than making it from natural gas, or burying captured carbon dioxide underground, he argued that carbon dioxide from power plants, factories and eventually the air itself could be combined with hydrogen, produced with renewable or nuclear electricity, to make methanol. Carbon would be recycled again and again instead of being dug up and released. His group also helped develop a direct methanol fuel cell with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and found new ways to convert methane directly into methanol. In 2006 he set out the plan for general readers in the book Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy.
The idea was put into practice in Iceland. Carbon Recycling International built a plant at Svartsengi that captures carbon dioxide from a geothermal power station and combines it with hydrogen to make renewable methanol. Completed in 2011 and 2012, it was described by the company as the first industrial-scale facility to use waste carbon dioxide as a resource for methanol, and it was named the George Olah plant. Olah attended the start of construction in 2009 and served on the company’s advisory board. Its capacity was later expanded to about 4,000 tonnes of methanol a year, recycling around 5,500 tonnes of carbon dioxide.
Why it matters
Olah’s methanol economy gave the world a practical model for recycling carbon dioxide into fuels and chemicals, an approach now being pursued by green-methanol plants around the world.
About George Olah
Budapest-born refugee chemist who used superacids to capture fleeting carbon ions, leading to cleaner high-octane fuels, and who championed turning carbon dioxide into methanol. Nobel Prize 1994.
More about George Olah
Sources
- George A. Olah, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- George Olah plant Carbon Recycling International
- George Olah, USC scientist who won Nobel Prize in chemistry, dies at 89 Bangor Daily News (Los Angeles Times)
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.