The methanol lobby/advocates are trying to find their place in the world of clean energy and clean chemicals and there was an interesting conference earlier today in which the case was made for methanol in a climate-friendly World. While clean methanol would have plenty of applications in lowering the carbon footprint of many chemicals, as it is a building block from which many products can be derived, the presentation focused on methanol as a fuel cell alternative to hydrogen. As the exhibit below shows, clean methanol would start with green hydrogen as a feedstock and so by definition would be more expensive to produce than green hydrogen. This would be offset by the greater density in methanol versus hydrogen, but more important by the much lower cost of infrastructure that would be needed to make methanol available – it is a liquid and could use existing infrastructure – such as fueling stations. It all still needs renewable power that we do not yet have to spare.
Source: Methanol Institute, C-MACC, April 2021
Every picture, when it comes to new energy ideas seems not to tell the whole story these days, and the process outlined in Exhibit above is not necessarily green all the way through, as once you have the green hydrogen, you need the right conditions to react the CO2 with the hydrogen – some heat and some pressure – and the demands on renewable power would be high if you were to avoid the production of CO2 – which could be recycled, however. It would likely be significantly cheaper to make Blue methanol, using a traditional methanol process but capturing the carbon associated. Again, the leap to “green” seems both overly expensive, a potential drain on renewable power resources, and unnecessary with an efficient carbon capture program.
Part of the argument for using green hydrogen is that it can then be reacted with captured carbon to make the methanol and that when the methanol is burned as a fuel it simply releases as much CO2 as was consumed to make it – so therefore it is effectively carbon neutral. This would be important in pushing methanol as a fuel. Blue methanol could not meet these standards for fuel but could find applications in the chemical space where the carbon is not released into the atmosphere.
