ABSTRACT
Although oxidation and biologically (i.e., wood distillation and fermentation) based routes still contribute significantly to the quantities of acetic acid produced worldwide, the carbonylation of methanol [Eg. (1)] has become generally accepted as the method of choice for the commercial generation of acetic acid and accounts for most new production capacity over the last two decades. The first commercially successful venture was a cobalt iodide-catalyzed carbonylation built by BASF in the mid-1960s [1,2] .
