Methanol is an alcohol which any (retooled) oil refinery can synthesize from natural gas or bio-gas (methane). It can run in automobiles , with a few modifications. It is clean and non-polluting. And, unlike ethanol, it does not require the substitution of food crops. you can even make it from wood and garbage.
Anyway, we have lots of natural gas-so why not quite using gasoline and convert to methyl alcohol? We don’t need to distill anything, and the synthesis process is cheap. unlike electric cars, we don’t have to worry about charging stations and recycling batteries. Plus, the fuel delivery infrastructure that we have (gas stations) can use the stuff now.
Seems like a plan to me!
There are lots of good reasons to use Methanol, but there are also some big problems, one of which is the fact that it’s a water-soluble poison. This may be too big a hurdle to overcome.
For that reason alone I believe that using it as a standard motor fuel would be a big mistake.
You do realize that you have to expend significant amounts of electricity to produce methanol. Now even assuming you have generating plants that do not produce greenhouse gases themselves, isn’t it better to use that electricity directly in a vehicle which runs more efficiently than an ICE?
Huh, I thought this was going to be about cigarettes.
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Methanol is an alcohol which any (retooled) oil refinery can synthesize from natural gas or bio-gas (methane).
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By retooling do you mean completely rebuilding new methanol production facilities, and by ‘any’ do you mean just those with steam cracking facilities?
Methanol production from natural gas involves heating methane (850C) at pressure (10-20atm) with steam and the catalyst of your choice.
Most oil refineries use vacuum distillation (the cheap and nasty ones use atmospheric distillation), which is a very different process to methanol production. Refineries do have cracking facilities - hydro cracking, hydro reforming and steam cracking which upgrades the crude and distillates to lighter better products.
The steam cracking part of a refinery is a similar process to methanol production in that you need pressure (not the same pressures) and steam at about 850C after that as I understand the similarities end.
So could you provide a citation regarding the viability or ‘retooling’ any refinery to become a methanol plant?
After that you could you explain where the feedstock for the methanol production will come from. Typically it will be natural gas, thus switching to a methanol economy will put a competing demand on gas used for peak electricity demand generation, ammonia generation for fertilizer and home heating.
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