Díaz-Urrutia and Ott (Reports, 22 March 2019, p. 1326) report a selective conversion of methane to methanesulfonic acid that is proposed to occur by a cationic chain reaction in which CH 3 + adds to sulfur trioxide (SO 3 ) to form CH 3 –S(O) 2 O + . This mechanism is not plausible because of the solvent reactivity of CH 3 + , the non-nucleophilicity of the sulfur atom of SO 3 , and the high energy of CH 3 –S(O) 2 O + .
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Roytman et al. (2019) studied this question.
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