[Gibber]

Is it possible to turn water into ethanol in a lab? Details?

I'm ending my first semester of organic chemistry, so I have a little knowledge base but not much.  It seems like it should be possible to me, but it also seems like I would know about it if it could be done cheaply.

Water to ethanol would have lots of practical application if it could be done cheaply.  Fuel is an obvious one.  Would purification be practical? If you could change water to ethanol, and then change the ethanol back to water it would kill lots of harmful bacteria.

Do you know where I can learn about research that's happening in this area? 

[Borek]

Is it possible to turn water into ethanol in a lab? Details?

Carbon?

[Gibber]

Carbon?

Carbon would be involved. You would have to get an 0H bond with CH2CH3. Can you react a carbon based molecule with H20 to get this product?

[Borek]

Ah, so you are talking not about making ethanol from water, but about reacting water with some other substance to produce ethanol?

[Gibber]

yes. At least that's how I assumed it had to work. Is it possible to get high concentrations of ethanol from water without reacting with anything else?

[Gibber]

Ah. You were saying it's not possible to get ethanol from water and were asking where the carbon
is. ?

[Albert]

Well, I think he definitely was...

[Gibber]

Probably. My knee-jerk reaction was that he didn't realize ethanol had carbon and was questioning where I was posting this. But it should have been obvious that that wasn't the case.  I can be thick sometimes. I also should have been more specific about the reaction in the topic post.

I'm interested in what anyone knows about creating ethanol by reacting water with CH2CH3(and anything else that is required).  I know enough about o-chem to know that the formation alcohols is common.  Usually this happens when a compound with a strong leaving group is reacted with water.  The leaving group leaves and OH bonds.  It seems like it would be cheap and easy to change water to ethanol, so I'm curious about why it's not commonly done.

[Yggdrasil]

1)  The starting material is probably to expensive, especially considering the expenses needed to purify the ethanol after reaction (see below).

2)  I don't know how much I would trust alcohol made in this method.  For example, a simple, cheap starting material would probably be chloroethane.  However, chloroalkanes are generally toxic, so you would have to go through a whole lot of purification in order to get food-grade ethanol from this process.

3)  A lot of alcohol (wine especially) gets its flavor from plant compounds which are extracted, fermented, and aged along with the alcohol.  Synthetic ethanol would not contain these flavor compounds.  So, if you could make cheap, safe ethanol from chemical synthesis, it would only be suitable for the cheap, plastic-bottle grade vodka whose only purpose is to get you drunk for as little money as possible.

[Gibber]

(despite title) I was actually thinking more a long the lines of an energy source than a beverage.  ClCH2CH3 and water would form ethanol without any additional energy needed correct?  The chlorine would break off and an OH would bond without requiring any heat.  Although I suppose chloroethane probably doesn't occur naturally, and energy would have to be spent to create it.  If your right and the reactants are more expensive than the product, it's pretty pointless. 

There are lots of naturally occurring compounds out there with long carbon chains.  Is there any cheap way of breaking these chains up?  They wouldn't all necessarily have to be the same length, just as long as they were short and had OH groups.  Would having a mixture of alcohols instead of pure ethanol interfere with anything?

[HP]

CH2=CH2 + H2O --> C2H5OH (cat. H3PO4 on solid support)
This is a Michael addition of water to ethen - industrial synthesis of ethanol...
For ethylene synthesis if starting from bulk carbon (coals):
CaCO3 + heat -> CaO + CO2
CaO + C --> CaC2 + CO
CaC2 + H2O --> Ca(OH)2 + C2H2 (ethyne)
Then C2H2 + H2 --> ethene
If starting directly from Ethyne:
C2H2 + H2O --cat> CH3CHO
C2H2 --comp> C + H2 (decomposition)
CH3CHO + H2 -->ethanol
CH3CHO + C2H5OH--> one of the important flavour components of the seasoned wine  Cherz!
It seems hard to me water-to wine synthesis without some carbon source. Of course cosmic synthesis of organic compounds need only light elements as H2, He to born Carbon and all other elements...Some thermonuclear H-bomb may help you for your problem but on very high price here on the Earth )

[Albert]

It seems hard to me water-to wine synthesis without some carbon source. Of course cosmic synthesis of organic compounds need only light elements as H2, He to born Carbon and all other elements...Some thermonuclear H-bomb may help you for your problem but on very high price here on the Earth )

Unless you are called Jesus...

[Gibber]

"CH2=CH2 + H2O --> C2H5OH (cat. H3PO4 on solid support)
This is a Michael addition of water to ethen - industrial synthesis of ethanol...
For ethylene synthesis if starting from bulk carbon (coals):
CaCO3 + heat -> CaO + CO2
CaO + C --> CaC2 + CO
CaC2 + H2O --> Ca(OH)2 + C2H2 (ethyne)
Then C2H2 + H2 --> ethene
If starting directly from Ethyne:
C2H2 + H2O --cat> CH3CHO
C2H2 --comp> C + H2 (decomposition)
CH3CHO + H2 -->ethanol"

Then you would have to use up coal.  If that's the cheapest solution though then it is .  Is this a common way to produce ethanol?  Do you know what ethanol is used for that's made this way, and do you know who makes it?

[Bakegaku]

I don't think it would work with Chloro-ethane, since one of the products is a strong acid and makes it seem energetically unfavourable. 

The ethylene idea seems good, though. 

Some thermonuclear H-bomb may help you for your problem but on very high price here on the Earth

heh.  Trying to use an H-bomb for something like this would entail the high price of LIFE.

[Alberto_Kravina]

The formed HCl can easily be neutralized with NaOH or another base, so it could be suitable....also, by removing a reaction product, you can move the equilibrium to the product side.