YouTuber Spends Two Years Making Alcohol From Thin Air, Doesn't Even Get Wasted
YouTuber NileRed spent two years attempting to synthesize ethanol from air, documenting the complex chemical challenges and failures involved in the process. The project highlights the difficulty of creating efficient catalysts for carbon-based synthesis.
Why it matters
The video serves as an educational look at the realities of experimental chemistry and the limitations of current catalytic technology.
Nigel “NileRed” Braun is one of the OG chemistry YouTubers, and he’s become famous on the platform for his Charlie Brown-esque air of melancholy, along with his unstinting devotion to performing experiments both ambitious and, well, strange . One of his ongoing projects involves turning anything and everything into alcohol. (The fact that he does this despite not in fact appearing to like alcohol feels significant here.)
Anyway, in a new video, Braun puts all his previous alcohol videos to shame by setting out to produce ethanol from thin air. Really.
The theory is actually pretty simple: air contains, among other things, hydrogen, carbon and oxygen. Ethanol contains hydrogen, carbon and oxygen! So basically, the idea is:
And in fairness, that is the idea—it’s just that, as ever, there’s an awful lot of detail lurking in those question marks.
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