This would be quite useful if it turned out to work at scale. Some like Nobel Prize winner George Olah talk about creating a methanol-based economy. It's one o

This would be quite useful if it turned out to work at scale. Some like Nobel Prize winner George Olah talk about creating a methanol-based economy. It's one of the simpler ways to turn energy and CO2 into something that can be burned later. Imagine such a process running at a distant windmill or solar farm. It could generate methanol and when the tanker truck was full, someone could drive it to market. That's much less infrastructure than some of the current systems. * Edit: A closer reading shows that this catalyst seems to work for inserting an oxygen into an existing methane molecule. Others are talking of building a methanol economy from CO2 and H2. In either case, the transportability and stability is a real plus.