Forget about the hydrogen economy. Methanol is the key to weaning the world off oil. George Olah tells us how to do it.
The hydrogen economy – with its vision of gas-guzzling engines replaced by hydrogen fuel cells that produce water instead of smog and greenhouse gases – is a big mistake, according to George Olah, winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize in chemistry.
Olah, whose research in the chemistry of hydrocarbons has led to high-octane fuels and more easily degradable hydrocarbons, is now director of the Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute at the University of Southern California. He argues that storing energy in the form of methanol, not hydrogen, could end our dependence on fossil fuels and transform carbon dioxide from a global-warming liability into an essential raw material for a methanol-based economy. Olah lays out his plan in a new book, Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy, published last week by Wiley-VCH.
Technology Review: Why methanol?
George Olah: Methanol in its own right is an excellent fuel. You can mix it into gasoline – it’s a much better fuel than ethanol. And we have developed a methanol fuel cell.
Methanol is a very simple chemical that can be made in a very efficient way. It is just one oxygen atom inserted into methane, the basal component of natural gas; but methanol is a liquid material which is easily stored, transported, and used.
TR: What’s wrong with hydrogen fuel cells?
GO: Even today you could put a pump dispensing methanol at every gasoline station. You can dispense it very well without any [new] infrastructure. For hydrogen, there is no infrastructure. To establish a hydrogen infrastructure is an enormously costly and questionable thing. Hydrogen is a very volatile gas, and there is no way to store or handle it in any significant amount without going to high pressure.
TR: But methanol is a way of storing energy, not a source of energy like gasoline. Where will the energy come from?
GO: The beauty is we can take any source of energy. Whether it’s from burning fossil fuels, from atomic plants, from wind, solar, or whatever. What we are saying is it makes a lot better sense, instead of trying to store and transport energy as very volatile hydrogen gas, to convert it into a convenient liquid. And there’s a fringe benefit: you really mitigate carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
TR: How do you make methanol?
GO: One approach is to produce methanol by converting still-existing huge reserves of natural gas, but in entirely different, new ways. Today, methanol is made exclusively from natural gas. Natural gas is incompletely burned, or converted, to synthesis gas, which can then be put together into methanol. Now we have developed ways to completely eliminate the use of synthesis gas.
The second approach involves carbon dioxide. We were co-inventors of the direct methanol fuel cell. This fuel cell uses methanol and produces CO2 and water. It occurred to us that maybe you could reverse the process. And, indeed, you can take carbon dioxide and water, and if you have electric power, you can chemically reduce it into methanol.
So the second leg of our methanol economy approach is to regenerate or recycle carbon dioxide initially from sources where it is present in high concentrations, like flue gases from a power plant burning natural gas. But eventually, and this won’t come overnight, we could just take out carbon dioxide from air.
TR: This would help address the problem of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, wouldn’t it?
GO: Sequestration [of carbon dioxide] is our [government’s] official policy and this is what everybody is swearing by. They say that you stick carbon dioxide down into the earth and at the bottom of the sea, and you solve the problem. [But] how long will it stay down there? Carbon dioxide is a very volatile material. Under the best of conditions it eventually will seep up. Our approach is very different: we simply say that if we need to dispose of carbon dioxide, we need to capture it – why not use it as a chemical raw material? In other words, recycle it.
TR: We’ve heard a lot lately about replacing gasoline with ethanol from biological sources and developing better batteries for super-efficient hybrid cars. Do these have a place in a methanol economy?
GO: I think we should explore all possibilities. There is no silver bullet. There is no single solution. I sincerely believe, however, that if you look really impartially, but hard-nosed, at the figures, the needs are so enormous that biological sources per se won’t solve them. The president mentioned making ethanol from cellulosic materials. In principle it’s possible, but it’s a very difficult, undeveloped, and, in my mind, unrealistic technology. Batteries, sure, we should try to find better batteries. But realistically today, fuel cells are a lot more convenient than any battery.
TR: What steps need to be taken now to move toward a methanol economy?
GO: I’m a great believer that technological development is done by major companies. ExxonMobil certainly has some means to do it. The only trouble is that so far they are not coming up with any reasonable solution. Basically, I don’t think they like [the methanol economy] very much. If you sit on a large supply of oil and gas, on which you make enormous profits, or if you are an Arab country that has great supplies and great wealth, you wouldn’t welcome some crazy guy who comes up and says that mankind can have an ultimate solution which would not be dependent, anymore, on what nature put under your soil.
If this methanol economy makes sense, and I think it does, there is not necessarily a monopoly any more for oil companies. Big chemical companies could equally well do this, or even better. But there is also a need for politicians and the public to say that they want to explore reasonable solutions.
TR: How urgent is the problem?
GO: Man began to use coal on a massive scale during the Industrial Revolution, which was, what, 250 years ago. And we are already, to a very significant degree, depleting what nature gave us. Now, I’m not saying we’ll run out of it overnight, but we need to think about how we manage our problems now and how we will manage in the future.
You see natural gas getting in short supply, and we import liquefied natural gas. There are many natural gas sources – Nigeria, the United Arab Emirates, the North Sea, and so on. The energy content of a single LNG tanker is equivalent to a medium-sized hydrogen bomb. Bad guys are trying to blow up refineries now, and a big tanker is a very inviting target. Who can guarantee that some crazy terrorist won’t blow up an LNG tanker? I think a realistic solution is, again, to convert natural gas, as efficiently as we can, into a safe liquid product, like methanol.
All people believe that what they are doing has some importance; but this [methanol research] is, in my mind, the most important thing I ever did in my career, and it has serious implications for society.
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/405436/the-methanol-economy/page/2/
Saturday, March 14, 2015
Ethanol Vs. Methanol by Patrick Takahashi
Ethanol and biodiesel are dead, long live methanol! Methanol is the simplest alcohol, with one carbon atom; ethanol has two. Thus, given biomass, it should be cheaper to produce methanol than ethanol. Surely enough, in a comprehensive assessment Stone & Webster performed for the U.S. Department of Energy two decades ago, with the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute as an associate, this fact was confirmed.
However, methanol has a few flaws. First, if drunk, you can go blind. But, who drinks gasoline? Second, there was a time when methanol was used as the feedstock to produce MTBE as a gasoline additive. MTBE is carcinogenic. Methanol is not, just don't drink it. Third, methanol can dissolve certain plastics and embrittle a some metals. So change the plastic and metals to avoid this problem.
Methanol has only half the energy content per gallon of gasoline. Ethanol is two-thirds the intensity of gasoline. However, a fuel cell powered vehicle is at least twice the efficiency of an internal combustion engine, so the tank storage problem would be solved with a direct methanol fuel cell. The DMFC for portable electronics is said to soon replace batteries, so the technology is real. Methanol is the only biofuel capable of being directly fed to a fuel cell. Ethanol and gasoline need to first be passed through an expensive reformer.
Plus, and this is difficult to accept, but true: one gallon of methanol has more hydrogen than one gallon of liquid hydrogen. Thus, the infrastructure is already largely in place for a methanol economy. George Olah in his book, Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy, provides all the science and speculation you need.
So why is our country and rest of world enamored over ethanol and biodiesel? In two words, the Farm Lobby. They came up with a politically brilliant scheme to use corn as an answer to imported oil. By so doing, the price of farm commodities recently doubled and more. Farmers are ecstatic! The poor around the world are suffering.
Global food riots occurred, so the Farm Lobby thought, oh, no problem, we'll now, more and more, begin to convert the cellulose into ethanol, for, after all, those tax incentives are already in place. Well, if you have biomass and want a biofuel, you either hydrolyze and ferment it to produce ethanol, or gasify and catalyze it to make methanol. But the current mentality is stuck in an ethanol mode. Before farmers and their partners build fermented ethanol from biomass factories, they need to totally re-think the long term and just change the congressional language to say: ethanol, biodiesel and other renewable biofuels. Methanol does not even need to be mentioned. Otherwise, they will be creating a second herd of white elephants.
With all this logic, won't methanol soon displace ethanol? No. Why? The Farm Lobby is so dominant that they will continue to insure for the continued use of ethanol for another decade because those facilities are already built, and they don't want them to suddenly become obsolete. Okay, fair enough, let those plants profitably phase out. But don't compound the problem by adding that second elephant herd.
I might add that there has been a sudden surge of interest in biofuels from algae. Certainly, as algae can be from two to ten times more efficient in converting sunlight into biomass than any terrestrial crop; grown in the ocean where there is no irrigation problem (and Peak Freshwater looms on the horizon); if fed the cold water effluent from the ocean thermal energy conversion process there will not be a need for fertilizers (deep ocean effluents are high in just the right nutrients--farm fertilizers are manufactured from fossil fuels); and with genetic engineering, who knows where this option can go--this has been my dream for a third of a century. However, the eventual costs are unknown. Yes, do the R&D, but don't expect a magic solution within a decade. Biomethanol is real and immediately available for commercial prospecting.
As no one I know is commercially jumping unto the methanol bandwagon, I will tomorrow publish a hypothetical letter to colleagues to inspire some enterprise. The strategies, then, become available to the readers of the Huffington Post. Also, too, perhaps some partnerships can be stimulated to come up to a better solution than ethanol and biodiesel. Let's do more than share ideas. Let's take action!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/patrick-takahashi/ethanol-vs-methanol_b_106380.html
However, methanol has a few flaws. First, if drunk, you can go blind. But, who drinks gasoline? Second, there was a time when methanol was used as the feedstock to produce MTBE as a gasoline additive. MTBE is carcinogenic. Methanol is not, just don't drink it. Third, methanol can dissolve certain plastics and embrittle a some metals. So change the plastic and metals to avoid this problem.
Methanol has only half the energy content per gallon of gasoline. Ethanol is two-thirds the intensity of gasoline. However, a fuel cell powered vehicle is at least twice the efficiency of an internal combustion engine, so the tank storage problem would be solved with a direct methanol fuel cell. The DMFC for portable electronics is said to soon replace batteries, so the technology is real. Methanol is the only biofuel capable of being directly fed to a fuel cell. Ethanol and gasoline need to first be passed through an expensive reformer.
Plus, and this is difficult to accept, but true: one gallon of methanol has more hydrogen than one gallon of liquid hydrogen. Thus, the infrastructure is already largely in place for a methanol economy. George Olah in his book, Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy, provides all the science and speculation you need.
So why is our country and rest of world enamored over ethanol and biodiesel? In two words, the Farm Lobby. They came up with a politically brilliant scheme to use corn as an answer to imported oil. By so doing, the price of farm commodities recently doubled and more. Farmers are ecstatic! The poor around the world are suffering.
Global food riots occurred, so the Farm Lobby thought, oh, no problem, we'll now, more and more, begin to convert the cellulose into ethanol, for, after all, those tax incentives are already in place. Well, if you have biomass and want a biofuel, you either hydrolyze and ferment it to produce ethanol, or gasify and catalyze it to make methanol. But the current mentality is stuck in an ethanol mode. Before farmers and their partners build fermented ethanol from biomass factories, they need to totally re-think the long term and just change the congressional language to say: ethanol, biodiesel and other renewable biofuels. Methanol does not even need to be mentioned. Otherwise, they will be creating a second herd of white elephants.
With all this logic, won't methanol soon displace ethanol? No. Why? The Farm Lobby is so dominant that they will continue to insure for the continued use of ethanol for another decade because those facilities are already built, and they don't want them to suddenly become obsolete. Okay, fair enough, let those plants profitably phase out. But don't compound the problem by adding that second elephant herd.
I might add that there has been a sudden surge of interest in biofuels from algae. Certainly, as algae can be from two to ten times more efficient in converting sunlight into biomass than any terrestrial crop; grown in the ocean where there is no irrigation problem (and Peak Freshwater looms on the horizon); if fed the cold water effluent from the ocean thermal energy conversion process there will not be a need for fertilizers (deep ocean effluents are high in just the right nutrients--farm fertilizers are manufactured from fossil fuels); and with genetic engineering, who knows where this option can go--this has been my dream for a third of a century. However, the eventual costs are unknown. Yes, do the R&D, but don't expect a magic solution within a decade. Biomethanol is real and immediately available for commercial prospecting.
As no one I know is commercially jumping unto the methanol bandwagon, I will tomorrow publish a hypothetical letter to colleagues to inspire some enterprise. The strategies, then, become available to the readers of the Huffington Post. Also, too, perhaps some partnerships can be stimulated to come up to a better solution than ethanol and biodiesel. Let's do more than share ideas. Let's take action!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/patrick-takahashi/ethanol-vs-methanol_b_106380.html
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