Kinetics of the conversion of bicarbonate to carbon dioxide

Himmelblau and Babb 1 added bicarbonate labelled with C-14 to solutions containing unlabelled bicarbonate and CO 2 . They measured the rate at which C-14 appeared in the CO 2 and deduced values of the rate-constant for the reaction between CO 2 and OH - . These values were up to 130 times as high as those found by other workers. A new reaction-mechanism is proposed to account for their experimental results, involving an exchange reaction between carbon-containing compounds.