Industrial chemists need catalysts to make everything from polythene and
painkillers, to fertilizers and fabrics. Without these magic ingredients – and
their biological equivalents – to speed up reactions, chemistry and life would
grind to a halt
METHANOL is a rather boring, colourless, liquid. You could leave it in a
bottle for a hundred years and it would not have changed. And yet chemists can
turn methanol into petrol just by passing it over a porous mineral called a
zeolite. New Zealand makes a large proportion of its motor fuel in exactly
this way.
The zeolite is rather special. It is a…
