Methanol economy

The methanol economy is a suggested future economy in which methanol and dimethyl ether replace fossil fuels as a means of energy storage, ground transportation fuel, and raw material for synthetic hydrocarbons and their products.

Methanol can be produced from a variety of sources including fossil fuels (natural gas, coal, oil shale, tar sands, etc.)

Green methanol is a liquid fuel that is produced from combining carbon dioxide and hydrogen (CO2 + 3 H2 → CH3OH + H2O) under pressure and heat with catalysts.

[9] Ethanol plants in the midwest are a good place for pure carbon capture to combine with hydrogen to make green methanol, with abundant wind and nuclear energy in Iowa, Minnesota, and Illinois.

Global methanol demand as a chemical feedstock reached around 42 million metric tonnes per year as of 2015.

Using the methanol-to-olefin (MTO) process, methanol can also be converted to ethylene and propylene, the two chemicals produced in largest amounts by the petrochemical industry.

[17] These are important building blocks for the production of essential polymers (LDPE, HDPE, PP) and like other chemical intermediates are currently produced mainly from petroleum feedstock.

Trinidad and Tobago is the world's largest methanol producer, with exports mainly to the United States.

The conventional route to methanol from methane passes through syngas generation by steam reforming combined (or not) with partial oxidation.

Methanol can be synthesized from carbon and hydrogen from any source, including fossil fuels and biomass.

CO2 emitted from fossil fuel burning power plants and other industries and eventually even the CO2 contained in the air, can be a source of carbon.

[21] Initially the major source will be the CO2 rich flue gases of fossil-fuel-burning power plants or exhaust from cement and other factories.

Chemical recycling of CO2 to new fuels and materials could thus become feasible, making them renewable on the human timescale.

Or with electric energy: Total: The necessary CO2 would be captured from fossil fuel burning power plants and other industrial flue gases including cement factories.

The electrical system efficiency including all losses of peripheral devices (e.g. cathode compressor, stack cooling) amounts to about 40 to 50% for a methanol fuel cell of RMFC type and to 40 to 55% for a hydrogen fuel cell of LT-PEMFC type.

Rather than attempt to store the hydrogen, plants immediately capture carbon dioxide from the air to allow the hydrogen to reduce it to storable fuels such as hydrocarbons (plant oils and terpenes) and polyalcohols (glycerol, sugars and starches).

In the methanol economy, any process which similarly produces free hydrogen, proposes to immediately use it "captively" to reduce carbon dioxide into methanol, which, like plant products from photosynthesis, has great advantages in storage and transport over free hydrogen itself.

Methanol is a liquid under normal conditions, allowing it to be stored, transported and dispensed easily, much like gasoline and diesel fuel.

It can also be readily transformed by dehydration into dimethyl ether, a diesel fuel substitute with a cetane number of 55.

This effect is already exploited in water treatment plants, where methanol is already used for denitrification and as a nutrient for bacteria.