The January/February 2002 issue of MIT's Technology Review was a special issue about energy. I was particularly intrigued by the article about natural gas. There are enough reserves to last thousands of years, but chemists haven't been able to figure out how to convert methane into an easily transportable form.
They are trying to find a catalyst to turn methane into methanol.
The catalyst needs to break the tight carbon-to-carbon bonds in methane to allow the oxygen to react. And -- here is where it gets really tricky -- the reaction needs to add a single oxygen atom to each methane molecule; allow it to continue and add an additional oxygen atom, and you create worthless carbon dioxide.
Enrique Iglesia, a chemical engineer who has been working on this problem for almost 20 years, says
Methane has one of the strongest bonds we know, and its reaction products usually have weaker bonds. It's tough to stop at the desired products, so this is tough chemistry.
Major oil companies are spending millions of dollars trying to find a catalyst for direct conversion of methane to methanol, and some small companies are focusing specifically on this problem. Roy Periana, a chemist at the University of Southern California who used to work for a small company called Catalytica, says
We have some leads, and we're coupling that with knowledge of how previous systems have worked. And right now, it's fair to say that this is a race. The fundamentals are laid down, and it's a matter of who will get there first. The question on everyone's mind now is who will find the right catalyst and when, and what will it be. It's not even a question of 'if.'
Why are they going to all that trouble to find a catalyst? Forget chemistry. This is a perfect application for nanotechnology. First build a universal assembler and disassembler. Use the disassembler to take the methane apart, then use the assembler to put the atoms back together, with one extra oxygen atom. Presto, you've got methanol. That's all there is to it. It may be tough chemistry, but for nanotechnology it's a piece of cake.
A catalyst is an atom or molecule that acts as a substrate or scaffold for a chemical reaction. It holds the reactants in the right position so they can react with each other. With assemblers, it is no longer necessary to have a unique catalyst for each reaction. A universal assembler can pick up any atom and put it anywhere. That's why it's universal. Thus catalysts have been rendered obsolete.
Universal assemblers will replace catalysts throughout the chemical industry, including the petrochemical industry. This is a trillion dollar opportunity. Venture capitalists, take note.
Obviously this page is sarcastic (at least I hope that's obvious). I just can't resist having a bit of fun at Eric Drexler's expense. I will say something about real investment opportunities in just a minute.
For a more serious discusion of assemblers vs. catalysts, consult these pages in Part 4 of Nanotechnology without Genies:
All machines are specialized
If something can be made with chemistry, it will cost more to make it with positional synthesis.
For a critique of the very idea of a universal assembler, consult Parts 1 and 2:
Nanotechnology without Genies: table of contents
Please don't tell me that the geniebusters argument is too abstract. That's the level on which the game is played. There are investment opportunities in nanotechnology, but only for investors who are willing to do some hard thinking. As in other high-tech fields (dotcom, telecom, Enron...) vast amounts of money will be lost in ill-conceived nanotech ventures. As always, a fool and his money are soon parted.
In other words, the first rule is: invest in something that makes sense.
If you can't tell what makes sense and what doesn't, you are in the wrong field. There are a lot of simpler things to invest in, and there is nothing wrong with investing in them. Warren Buffett refuses to invest in anything he doesn't understand. This is an excellent policy for everybody.
Now, about real investment opportunities. Of course the obvious thing to do is make exotic new materials. That's already being done. Beyond that, I will mention four others.
1. Rock's Law states that the cost of chip factories doubles every four years. If you extrapolate that graph a few decades into the future, chip factories will soon cost tens of billions of dollars, then hundreds of billions... Obvously that isn't going to happen. Something's got to give. At some point in the near future, somebody will invent a radically new way to make chips. They may not be "chips" exactly, they may be something else that serves the same purpose. In any case, they will be orders of magnitude cheaper to make.
2. Water is an increasingly rare and precious commodity. It has been said that water is the oil of the 21st century. Whoever invents an economical way to extract pure water from sea water (more precisely, whoever owns the invention) will be sitting on a gold mine. This doesn't require nanotechnology per se, but it will involve closely related technologies. As far as that goes, oil itself may be in short supply in the future, and nanotechnology (or closely related technologies) can be used to extract the remaining oil from old wells.
3. In the 20th century, atomic energy was released as heat and random radiation. This is great for blowing things up and contaminating the environment, but it's not ideal as a source of energy. As our understanding of atoms becomes more fine-grained, somebody will invent a transducer that will be a direct link between the atomic world and our world, so atomic energy can be brought up here to our level in a useful form, not as heat but as coherent energy. This is the real promise of quantum engineering. (There are various ways to describe what we are doing. I prefer to call it quantum engineering or femtochemistry rather than nanotechnology.)
4. Finally, coming back to the methane problem. What you want is not exactly a catalyst, but a cycle, along the lines of the Krebs cycle. You also need to create a scaffold to support the cycle. The scaffold isn't going to be a single atom or molecule, but something quite a bit more complex. This can be done. It's not really that hard, once you venture out of the box.
I'm not going to say anything specific about how I'm approaching these problems. Nanotechnology isn't science fiction anymore. It's a real industry now, and we can't talk about it as freely as we could a decade ago. I don't believe in giving away billion dollar ideas. It's difficult to talk about my work without giving away the family jewels. I think I have said enough.
However, there is one other thing that should be mentioned. Engines of Creation isn't really about atoms, it's about robots. According to Engines, atomic positioners are the enabling technology for nanocomputers, which are the enabling technology for full-fledged automated engineering systems, which will build everything for free. My critique of Engines, Nanotechnology without Genies, isn't really about atoms, either. It's a reply to Eric Drexler's vision of a world of robots. It's about how automated systems fit into the general scheme of things. Atoms are a side issue.
It is true that robots (of all sizes) will be pervasive in the coming years. They won't play the role he expects them to play, but they will exist and have profound effects on our businesses and our lives. The same software that we already use in other contexts (peer to peer networking, web services) can be carried over to swarms of robots. Anyone who wants to be a serious player in the nanotech business should be thinking about software as much as hardware. A robot doesn't have to look like a robot, and it doesn't have to be on site, down there among the atoms.
This page (c) 2003 by Lyle Burkhead. All rights reserved.