> How is this a reverse version of the Haber process? Which > process was invented during WWI, not WWII, by Fritz Haber, > not "them".
I haven't a clue as to those details. The stuff in my Sunday posting was rephrased from "questionable" material sent to me (and probably to a lot of others) by a group with a strong anti-petroleum political agenda. Often these groups, in their zeal to expose some real or imagined plot, get some of the science wrong. Here, I am not so sure. I see in a quick google search that Haber was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1918, a decision which met with significant opposition given his wartime activities on the synthesis of ammonia for the German ammunition industry, which came a little to late for them to win that war. Of Jewish descent Haber was forced to flee from his homeland in 1933, seeking exile from the Nazi government's policies against Jews. The Nazis supposedly took this body of work, commandeered his Institute and the Haber's process for ammonia and converted it for use during WWII to utilize the large amount of brown coal which they had locally into various fuels and chemicals for the war effort, once they had been expelled from the Crimean oil fields. As I understand the Haber process, it is the first large scale use of common gases, combined with catalysts and pressure - to make new molecules - and presumably that theme can go beyond ammonia, but as to how that is now being done (if at all) to make artificial methane, that is not clear. But with ammonia synthesis, one is adding 3 hydrogen's to nitrogen, and with methane synthesis it would be 4 hydrogens to carbon (or else hydrolyzing coal-derived methanol) so the cross-connection there seems believable. If this were accurate, the irony is not lost there, as the Russians occupied East Germany for so long, bled it dry, and are now leaching even more Euros from a reunited Germany than they ever did before. A further irony would be found in the fact that the Russians, who the Germans detest, using a German-invented process (probably perfected in occupied East Germany to boot) in order to supply multi-billion Euros worth of methane gas, through expensive pipelines which the Germans financed, all the while realizing that the Germans could, theoretically, be making this gas themselves, if they were not so anti-nuclear. That would be my take on it. Jones Plus, the further irony is that in the USA, the same petro-mafia which has bled our populace nearly dry, and dodged taxes by using off-shore banks, is now poised to do the same. That is, to use the same complex process, stolen by espionage from the Russians, and given to the petro-mafia by their Cronies high in the present administration, to do the same economic deception thing once again (as with encouraging if not creating OPEC, which has earned them billions)... and, just as soon as natural methane runs short and they can obtain *public financing* to pay for everything. Not a bad business plan, Dick. At least this is what the proponents of this new conspiracy theory want you to believe, whether it is accurate of not. I can't say that I buy into it whole-heartedly, but there could be some truth to it, as all the greed-motives and past corporate history are all aligned correctly for this to happen.
