Plastic2Oil Inc (PTOI)

[SteveF]

The purpose of a catalyst is to alter the output of a reaction.

I'm no chemist but I believe that to be a false statement. A catalyst speeds up the reaction, it cannot alter the make-up of the output and still be just a catalyst.

"A catalyst is a substance which alters the rate of a chemical reaction but is chemically unchanged at the end of the reaction."

http://www.purchon.com/chemistry/catalyst.htm

In a general sense, anything that increases the rate of a process is a "catalyst", a term derived from Greek ?ata??e??, meaning "to annul," or "to untie," or "to pick up." The phrase catalysed processes was coined by Jöns Jakob Berzelius in 1836[12] to describe reactions that are accelerated by substances that remain unchanged after the reaction. Other early chemists involved in catalysis were Alexander Mitscherlich who referred to contact processes and Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner who spoke of contact action and whose lighter based on hydrogen and a platinum sponge became a huge commercial success in the 1820s. Humphry Davy discovered the use of platinum in catalysis. In the 1880s, Wilhelm Ostwald at Leipzig University started a systematic investigation into reactions that were catalyzed by the presence of acids and bases, and found that chemical reactions occur at finite rates and that these rates can be used to determine the strengths of acids and bases. For this work, Ostwald was awarded the 1909 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.[13]]
...
Catalysts do not change the extent of a reaction: they have no effect on the chemical equilibrium of a reaction because the rate of both the forward and the reverse reaction are both affected (see also thermodynamics). The fact that a catalyst does not change the equilibrium is a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalysis