Despite the vitriol flying back and forth, it's an interesting problem on an industrial scale--what IS the most efficient way to make formic acid?
Lye and CO are cheap & easy, but as the above post said, you need an acid (I guess usually sulfuric) to decompose the formed formate. This is wasteful, and produces waste, which you must pay to get rid of.
A more elegent method would involve decomposing the sodium formate with HCl, forming NaCl, which could bee reformed by electrolysis into Cl2 and NaOH, the Cl2 beeing burned with hydrogen to produce the HCl again. This would then effectively amount to a large contiuous electrolysis operation, and I can easily see why industry would prefer to simply produce formic acid by direct CO2 / H2 synthesis. On the whole, it would probably be a lot more efficient than making lye, acid, etc.
On the other hand, for the process that needs HCl, seeing as how many processes that use chlorine for oxidation or chlorination end up using only half of it, and producing HCl as a byproduct, the aforementioned process would give a useful way to regenerate chlorine in an industrial cycle.
I also wonder whether dehydrogenation of methanol over zinc/copper to formaldehyde followed by canizzaro reaction and separation would bee a useful method. AFAIK, methanol can bee produced from synthesis gas. The advantage of this process is that it would need no electricity, and would produce in variable, controllable quantities, hydrogen, methanol, formaldehyde, and formic acid, all valuable industrial chemicals.
I still say the coolest friend to have is the one that owns the nitroalkane factory ^^
