The region is steeped in gold, quite literally. The area is dotted with gold mines, and is home to some of China’s largest gold mining companies. Everywhere you look the chinese symbol for gold (shown above) is prominent – it really is quite something.

During my brief stay, I met the president of the Yantai Gold Bureau and senior representatives of both the Shandong Zhaojin group (one of the largest gold mining companies in China) and Yantai University. The purpose of these meetings was to discuss the potential of forming a centre of excellence at Yantai University for research into new scientific and technological uses of gold. It transpired that all parties were fully supportive of the venture, including local government, meaning the centre will proceed under Professor Qi’s stewardship at the university.

This is a most exciting venture, bringing together considerable resource and expertise in the field. Here at the WGC we applaud the hard work and tenacity of Professor Qi in bringing the centre of excellence ever closer to fruition, and look forward to building on our already strong relationship in the future.

Update, 25th Feb 2010. Below is a picture of our delegation visiting the fantastic local gold musuem, where we all were able to pick up a 12.5kg bar of pure gold!

The ‘perspective’ letter, written by well known Danish researchers in the field, highlights the real potential in this breakthrough. They discuss the importance of identifying efficient catalysts in the industrially vital field of oxidation reactions, and how gold may prove itself applicable to large scale processes in the future.  This is definitely worth taking a look at if you’re working in the field.

Here at the World Gold Council we are particularly excited to see the publication of this article in such an eminent journal. The tone of the piece certainly fits in with our aim of aiding the acceleration of gold-based technologies to market by providing marketing expertise and offering various funding strategies. For more information on our funding programmes, see here.

Blogging will be a bit lighter over the next week or so, with Christmas and the New year celebrations…

This is an important paper indeed. Take gold as an example – it’s pretty expensive stuff, as are all of the noble metals employed as catalysts. If, say, 50% of a precious metal catalyst is in fact inactive/poorly active because the particles are not of an optimal size then that adds up to a lot of wasted gold. A better understanding of the link between particle size and activity will undoubtedly make for more efficient (both chemically and economically!) catalysts

Angewandte Chemie

The first comes from the labs of Masatake Haruta, and is titled ‘Propene Epoxidation with dioxygen catalysed by gold clusters’. As many of you will be aware, this is an important reaction as the product (methyloxirane) is a key building block for the manufacture of polyurethane, along with various other organic intermediates and solvents. Making methyloxirane cleanly and in good yield is not simple, and gold-based catalysis has long shown great potential in this important reaction, something furthered by Professor Haruta’s paper.

The second paper I spotted comes from the labs of Graham Hutchings in Cardiff. Here the team have shown enhanced catalytic activity of specific Au-Pd catalysts supported on TiO₂ for the direct synthesis of H₂O₂ from H₂ and O₂.

Finally, Stephen Hashmi has penned a nice communication dealing with the liason of palladium and gold catalysts as a basis for a new class of cross-coupling reactions.

To me, each of these high quality papers is a clear indication of the strength of gold-based catalysis research at the moment.