Heinz Heine­mann, a long-time lec­tur­er in the Col­lege of Chem­istry at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley, and a chem­istry researcher at Lawrence Berke­ley Nation­al Lab­o­ra­to­ry, died Nov. 23 of pneu­mo­nia at Sib­ley Hos­pi­tal in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. He was 92. Dur­ing a 60-year career in indus­try and acad­e­mia, Heinz con­tributed to the inven­tion and devel­op­ment of 14 com­mer­cial fos­sil fuel process­es, received 75 patents and was the author of more than a hun­dred pub­li­ca­tions. Among his inven­tions was a process for con­vert­ing methanol to gaso­line. At his death, he was a dis­tin­guished sci­en­tist in the Wash­ing­ton office of LBNL. Dur­ing the peri­od 2001 to 2004, he served as a man­ag­er of the Wash­ing­ton Chem­i­cal Soci­ety (ACS) and as pres­i­dent of its Retired Chemists Group.

Born in Berlin, Ger­many, he attend­ed the Uni­ver­si­ty and Tech­nis­che Hochschule in Berlin (Munich?). When his doc­tor­al dis­ser­ta­tion was reject­ed because he was Jew­ish, he made his way to Basel, Switzer­land, where he received his PhD in phys­i­cal chem­istry from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Basel, before com­ing to the Unit­ed States in 1938. He became a U.S. cit­i­zen in 1944. He worked for sev­er­al petro­le­um com­pa­nies in Louisiana and Texas and won a post­doc­tor­al fel­low­ship at the then-Carnegie Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, now Carnegie-Mel­lon Uni­ver­si­ty. The fel­low­ship was fund­ed by the gov­ern­ment of the Domini­can Repub­lic and involved research into ethanol, which was made from the Domini­can Repub­lic’s pri­ma­ry cash crop, sug­ar cane.

He pub­lished more than 150 papers and over 50 patents in catal­y­sis and petro­le­um chem­istry, most­ly while work­ing for Houdry Process Corp., the MW Kel­logg Co. as direc­tor of chem­i­cal and engi­neer­ing research, and the Mobil Research and Devel­op­ment Co. as man­ag­er of catal­y­sis research. Dur­ing those years he active­ly par­tic­i­pat­ed in the research and devel­op­ment of 14 com­mer­cial process­es, includ­ing the process for con­vert­ing methanol to gasoline.

After retir­ing from indus­try in 1978, he joined the Lawrence Berke­ley Nation­al Lab­o­ra­to­ry as a researcher and became a lec­tur­er in the Depart­ment of Chem­i­cal Engi­neer­ing at UC Berke­ley. His research involved coal gasi­fi­ca­tion, cat­alyt­ic coal liq­ue­fac­tion, hydro­den­i­tri­fi­ca­tion, nitro­gen oxide emis­sion con­trol and the devel­op­ment of a spe­cial cat­a­lyst that enables methane, the major com­po­nent of nat­ur­al gas, to be used to make petro­chem­i­cals. The research team he led invent­ed and patent­ed a process known as cat­alyt­ic oxydehydrogenation.

He was a co-founder of the Philadel­phia Catal­y­sis Club, the Catal­y­sis Soci­ety of North Amer­i­ca and the Inter­na­tion­al Con­gress of Catal­y­sis, serv­ing as its pres­i­dent from 1956 to 1960. He was the founder of Catal­y­sis Reviews, and worked as its edi­tor for 20 years. He also was Con­sult­ing Edi­tor for over 90 books in the Chem­i­cal Indus­tries Series, pub­lished by Mar­cel Dekker, Inc.

He received many hon­ors, among them elec­tion to the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Engi­neer­ing , the Houdry Award of the Catal­y­sis Soci­ety, the Mur­phree Award of the Amer­i­can Chem­i­cal Soci­ety, the H.H. Lowry Award pre­sent­ed for research he pur­sued in his sev­en­ties, and a Dis­tin­guished Scientist/Engineer award of the U.S. Depart­ment of Ener­gy. In addi­tion, he was elect­ed a mem­ber of the Span­ish Coun­cil for Sci­en­tif­ic Research for his sup­port in found­ing its Insti­tute of Catal­y­sis and Petrochemistry.

He is sur­vived by his wife of 10 years, Dr. Bar­bara Tenen­baum of Wash­ing­ton, D.C.; daugh­ter Sue Heine­mann of Oak­land, Calif.; and son and daugh­ter-in-law Peter M. Heine­mann and Dana Kueffn­er of San Fran­cis­co. His first wife, Elaine P. Heine­mann, died in 1993 after 46 years of marriage.
 
Source: Decem­ber 6, 2005 Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley News (http://chemistry.berkeley.edu/Publications/news/fall2005/heinz_obit.html)