Who knows about this technology?

Patent law does not permit patenting a chemical reaction. You could only patent a machine that uses a reaction. Patents are temporary, usually good for 20 years. After that anyone can legally copy and sell your patented idea.

And by the way, your chemical equation isn't even balanced. You have one C on the left and two on the right. And all you are showing (trying to show) is the combustion reaction written backward. As if you could take smoke and make wood out of it. Maybe you can, but only with an input of energy from another source. It isn't free fuel.

The amount of energy needed to make that reaction work is enormous.

The only patent on it is held by plants, which do it as a natural thing. But you've left an important reactant out:

carbon dioxide + water + sunlight = (after a bit more processing) ethanol.

The sunlight is what provides the necessary energy.

The previous posts are right, it's like saying you can get energy from pushing rocks uphill. How are you going to get energy from molecules in a highly stable configuration with strong valency bonds to break apart and form a more unstable configuration without inputting big amounts of energy?

Much of what passes for debate on Answers doesn't even pass high school or GCSE science. The level of knowledge on the Climate Change section is really bad. Perhaps we shouldn't get the vote in a highly technical society until we reach our science grades. That way we wouldn't vote for politicians who promise the impossible.

In 1890 Prof. Richard Threlfall predicted that the then recent discovery of radio frequency radiation by Heinrich Hertz would be used for long distance signalling. That was a couple of years before Marconi started. Around the same time or earlier anthrax vaccines imported from France for sheep were unreliable. An Australian farmer developed the first reliable anthrax vaccine. Again around the same time a mining company in Australia developed a method of separating good ore from dirt using a system called froth flotation. This was used by the Guggenheim family in the USA to extract silver ore from abandoned mines in the US south west and made their fortune. A similar invention was used by another miner, D.Arcy, at Mount Morgan near Rockhampton to make a fortune from gold mining. He went on to found the company that later became British Petroleum. BP About 1895 the first or second ever medical X-rays were taken in Adelaide by Bragg Around the same time some people were experimenting with wireless telegraphy here, including Bragg, the man who took the first X-ray here. Bragg and his son went on to win a Nobel for X-ray diffraction. In Ballarat, Henry Sutton developed the basic ideas needed for the fax machine. Sutton is supposed to have read of Bell's telephone in a magazine and said "Why didn't I think of that?" then immediately produced a dozen different telephones using a dozen different principles. In the early 20th century the continent was over run by two introduced pests, the rabbit, and the prickly pear cactus. During the 1930s scientists introduced an American moth, Cactoblastis cactorum which devastated the prickly pear. Fifteen years alter they did it again by introducing myxomatosis, which killed off most of the rabbits. More recently another disease is keeping the rabbits down, also introduced by scientists. Another success was the elimination of an introduced water weed called salvinia using an insect. An Australian woman, Elizabeth Kenny who had been an army nurse in the first world war developed effective treatments for the muscular paralysis caused by poliomyelitis. Most of the reconnaissance aircraft used by the British in the Second World War were "cottonised", using methods developed by an Australian called Sidney Cotton. In the 1950s there were two important inventions that nobody has heard about, the flame ionisation detector (FID) for gas chromatography which could detect hydrocarbons in samples at the sub-parts per million range, though this was also partly developed in South Africa. The second was the atomic absorption spectrophotometer (AA) which allows rapid analysis of metals at low levels. The use of the AA and the FID led to growing consciousness of pollution in the 1960s. In the 1950s Australian immunologists developed the theory of clonal selection which basically explains how the body makes antibodies to foreign matter inside it. Nobel prize to Frank Macfarlane Burnet. Frank Fenner, Burnet's colleague helped develop the rabbit control myxomatosis and also headed the global drive to eliminate smallpox. Copley Medal The "black box" flight recorder, the "bionic ear", WiFi etc have already been mentioned. In the early 1960s Australia was the first overseas market of any size for Japanese cars, but Australia still produced more cars than Japan for several years after that and it is still a big industry here. You will find Australian built cars on the US, Saudi Arabian, South African and a few other markets. Medical and biological research is probably the leading area of science in Australia followed perhaps by radio astronomy.

*ahem*.... Just from a casual, partially educated point of view here...

1. there are an uneven number of hydrogen atoms on each side of that equation. There would be some heinous byproduct on the right side beyond ethanol that has been left out of that equation for convenience's sake.

2. co2 and h20 are very stable molecules. You can't just put them down on paper & reconfigure them into different chains of elemental atoms without a crazy ammount of energy and intermediary chemical proceses. Simply put, this process would take more energy to make happen, than the resulting ethanol would ever provide.

First, C2H5COOH is not ethanol, it is not even an alcohol it's and acid, specifically propionic acid. Ethanol is C2H5OH.

Ethanol can be burned to produce CO2 and H2O, the reaction is:

C2H5OH+3O2 ---------> 2CO2+3H2O

There may be a way to drive the reaction the other way, but it would require an input of energy.

David: Why would you, of all people, post this question ?

Did you expect to initiate yet another conspiracy theory, or is it an acerbic attempt at humor ? There are hundreds of people (kids) posting on yahoo answers. Help them out. Its obvious most of them are confused enough as it is.

Call me. B.

sorry have no idea