A methanol economy?




12 thoughts on “A methanol economy?”

  1. Very interesting…clean up the fuel combustion products with the fuel itself! I guess in the end, we will still need hydrogen production in large quantities from a green source. From all the possible energy choices for the future, and everybody trying to push their own ideas, I wonder is this is preventing progress… this methanol economy certainly sounds nice though.

  2. Since using flammable liquid as an energy carrier causes CO2, why don’t we stick with a solid state battery? Flammable liquid was good when we didn’t know about nanotechnology.

  3. MQ, your point is an entirely fair one in principle; the only difficulty is that the prices and performances of batteries are not improving very fast, so that at the moment battery powered cars don’t really make economic sense. This may change, of course, but the attraction of the methanol economy idea is that it takes into account the substantial inertia of existing technological systems.

    Eric, of course you are right, this still doesn’t take away the need to make a lot of either electricity or hydrogen sustainably. Unless, of course, one works out how to make methanol directly from carbon dioxide and water, powered by light energy from the sun. This is certainly possible in principle, but we would need lots of work to find suitable photocatalytic systems.

  4. …and then by trying to take advantage of a horseshoe he forgot to create the internal combustion engine…

  5. You could make olefins too, but there wouldn’t really be any point to do this for fuel, as methanol has many advantages as a fuel over gasoline. For diesel engines, you’d use dimethyl ether, a simply made derivative of methanol.

  6. Methanol is the simpest alcohol and as such is the simplest to synthesize. More complex hydrocarbons can be made from the methanol – using a Fischer-Tropsch process – but each step removes energy from the total and the final gasoline is not capable of delivering the same very high levels of thermal efficiency that methanol can give (be better than diesel with the right engine modifications). So, to make higher hydrocarbons from the methanol would (a) deliver less usable fuel energy to the market, (b) give less usable energy on its conversion in the vehicle and (c) require further capital investment in a bigger chemical plant, i.e. well-to-wheels efficiency and economics are both against it. Having said this, it is very important to note that some of the methanol (if made from atmospheric or recovered CO2) should be turned into olefins for plastics etc., because doing this would actually sequestrate what was previously CO2 in a solid form. One can then influence the level of atmospheric CO2 directly. The molecular hydrogen economy cannot allow this – it’s ‘advantage’ of no carbon in the fuel actually becomes its Achilles heel.

  7. Whoops, didn’t check back for a while.

    Okay. I’d thought gasoline or diesel was actually superior, at least in energy density, vs. alcohols which have oxygen atoms in them taking up mass, but that’s an ill-informed opinion, and certainly energy loss from multiple stages is an obvious consideration.

  8. David, I don’t have the figure to hand, but I think that the energetics of the process are dominated by the energy you need to make molecular hydrogen from whatever feedstock you are using; then I think the reaction between CO2 and H2 is exothermic.

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