Baba :
Slide 2 casually states that you can "extract chlorine directly from the earth," and Slide 4 says the same for cerium.
The Reality: Chlorine is highly reactive and does not exist in its pure, elemental gas form (Cl_2) in nature. It exists as ionic salts (like sodium chloride/table salt). Turning salt into chlorine gas requires industrial-scale chloralkali electrolysis cells, not just digging it up.
Similarly, cerium is a rare-earth metal. You cannot just pick it out of the dirt; it requires complex metallurgical refining from specific minerals like monazite. The text in Slide 2 states: "To get benzyl chlorine..." * The Reality: There is no such chemical as "benzyl chlorine." The correct term for the molecule they are trying to describe is benzyl chloride (which is correctly written in the chemical equation as C_6H_5CH_2Cl). The slides outline the Andrussow process to create hydrogen cyanide (HCN) by reacting methane, ammonia, and oxygen at 1,200°C over a platinum catalyst.
The Reality: This is a high-temperature, high-pressure industrial chemical process. Attempting to replicate an industrial gas-phase catalytic reaction at 1,200°C in a makeshift environment would simply result in an explosion or immediate, lethal exposure to hydrogen cyanide gas. Slide 4 suggests performing a gas-phase ketonization of phenylacetic acid using a ceria-alumina catalyst, but then states, "For our solid acid we will be using tartaric acid."
The Reality: Tartaric acid is a standard organic powder (often used in baking as cream of tartar). It is completely incapable of acting as a high-temperature, solid-state industrial catalyst framework like ceria-alumina. If heated to the temperatures required for gas-phase ketonization, tartaric acid would simply burn, char, and decompose into carbon.
2026-05-17 18:52:13