Paul Sabatier

Paul Sabatier was a French chemist who, working with Jean-Baptiste Senderens, discovered that carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide could be reacted with hydrogen gas over a nickel catalyst to produce methane and water, a reaction that came to bear his name. First described around the turn of the twentieth century and long used mainly as a laboratory and industrial hydrogenation method, the Sabatier reaction became a foundational energy technology decades later as the chemistry behind power-to-gas systems, which convert surplus renewable electricity, via hydrogen made by electrolysis, into synthetic methane that can be stored and distributed using existing natural gas infrastructure. Sabatier shared the 1912 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on catalytic hydrogenation.