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Researchers successfully convert methane gas into liquid methanol

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Re: Researchers successfully convert methane gas into liquid methanol

#11

Post by sfink »

anonporridge wrote: post #3

This may make it easier to bottle up and sell the methane gas as fuel so it can be burned efficiently elsewhere, since transporting gas from remote locations is very hard and expensive, either in pipelines or chilled and liquefied. Still ends up as CO2 in the atmosphere, but that's drastically better than methane, which eventually reacts into CO2 anyway after decades of 10-80x warming. This is especially true at the…

I wonder how efficient the conversion in the article would be, after being adapted to real world "dirty" methane instead of pure.

Re: Researchers successfully convert methane gas into liquid methanol

#12

Post by anonporridge »

sfink wrote: post #11
anonporridge wrote: post #3

This may make it easier to bottle up and sell the methane gas as fuel so it can be burned efficiently elsewhere, since transporting gas from remote locations is very hard and expensive, either in pipelines or chilled and liquefied. Still ends up as CO2 in the atmosphere, but that's drastically better than methane, which eventually reacts into CO2 anyway after decades of 10-80x warming. This is especially true at the…

I wonder how efficient the conversion in the article would be, after being adapted to real world "dirty" methane instead of pure.

That is something I mentioned in another comment below.

It's still an open question whether conversion to methanol, transportation, and sale will be cheap enough to actually generate a profit. It the real world, it might simply cost too much or be too dirty of a conversion that the numbers don't add up.

In this case, then we will still be better off just burning it efficiently on site.

Re: Researchers successfully convert methane gas into liquid methanol

#13

Post by blueflow »

anonporridge wrote: post #10
blueflow wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we'd be better off bottling it up as methanol where it can be burned efficiently elsewhere. Liquid gas is compressed methane, and some industries and cars already run by burning it. So the infrastructure already exists.

You mean liquefied natural gas? Yeah, that's doable, but as Europe is finding out right now, it's very expensive. You have to keep the liquefied gas sufficiently chilled all through transport. You wouldn't have to do that with methanol.

I mean liquefied methane, which does not need to have fossil sources. It is also generated by biomass facilities who operate on farm waste.

> You have to keep the liquefied gas sufficiently chilled all through transport

No, just compressed. Same as with hydrogen.

Re: Researchers successfully convert methane gas into liquid methanol

#14

Post by Puradolia »

im3w1l wrote: post #9

How much sense would it make to do solar -> hydrogen -> methane -> methanol?

There's no reason to do that. You do not want to create more methane, and the possibility of even a trickling of it getting into the atmosphere. This methane to methanol is purely to get rid of the methane we produce, and hopefully the methane stored in the atmosphere. We've got plenty of hydrogen, it's one of the most common elements (iirc) in the known universe, but to convert some into methane? Hydrogen is clean, and then make it toxic methane? It's much better to just use the hydrogen as fuel. I remember seeing an article one time about a method to convert hydrogen into fuel, and so it's much better to do it that way. Though how costly or doable on a mass scale either conversion is, we don't know yet.

Re: Researchers successfully convert methane gas into liquid methanol

#16

Post by labster »

Puradolia wrote: post #14
im3w1l wrote: post #9

How much sense would it make to do solar -> hydrogen -> methane -> methanol?

There's no reason to do that. You do not want to create more methane, and the possibility of even a trickling of it getting into the atmosphere. This methane to methanol is purely to get rid of the methane we produce, and hopefully the methane stored in the atmosphere. We've got plenty of hydrogen, it's one of the most common elements (iirc) in the known universe, but to convert some into methane? Hydrogen is clean,…

Methane is not toxic, in fact it’s frustratingly inert. Leading to long atmospheric residence time in decades. Unless you meant to type toxic methanol, which is true, but it’s not that toxic. Just don’t drink the wood alcohol, okay?

I think the plan is to produce methane from hydrogen on Mars for the return trip on Starship. Kind of a niche case, though.

Re: Researchers successfully convert methane gas into liquid methanol

#18

Post by scythe »

blueflow wrote: post #13
anonporridge wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean liquefied natural gas? Yeah, that's doable, but as Europe is finding out right now, it's very expensive. You have to keep the liquefied gas sufficiently chilled all through transport. You wouldn't have to do that with methanol.

I mean liquefied methane, which does not need to have fossil sources. It is also generated by biomass facilities who operate on farm waste. > You have to keep the liquefied gas sufficiently chilled all through transport No, just compressed. Same as with hydrogen.

The vapor pressure of methane is about 6.25 MPa. For comparison a bike tire has about 0.4 MPa, a car tire closer to 0.2-0.25. So you need a pretty damn good compressor and pressure vessel / pipeline, versus a simple tank for methanol. Also worth noting that the methanol can later be easily converted to dimethyl ether and used as a cleaner-burning diesel fuel (vapor pressure ~0.5 MPa), where it may be possible to convert existing engines:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2021.6633...

Re: Researchers successfully convert methane gas into liquid methanol

#19

Post by MayeulC »

blueflow wrote: post #13
anonporridge wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean liquefied natural gas? Yeah, that's doable, but as Europe is finding out right now, it's very expensive. You have to keep the liquefied gas sufficiently chilled all through transport. You wouldn't have to do that with methanol.

I mean liquefied methane, which does not need to have fossil sources. It is also generated by biomass facilities who operate on farm waste. > You have to keep the liquefied gas sufficiently chilled all through transport No, just compressed. Same as with hydrogen.

I haven't read TFA yet (edit: as I thought, it's very light in details), but I know it's a hassle to spring up gas distribution logistics where it's only a secondary product (oil wells). The question is: is this new method simple enough to put in practice at production sites?

Re: Researchers successfully convert methane gas into liquid methanol

#20

Post by coderenegade »

im3w1l wrote: post #9

How much sense would it make to do solar -> hydrogen -> methane -> methanol?

I don't think you need to go through methane to get from hydrogen to methanol, you just synthesize methanol directly once you have the hydrogen. In fact, most methanol is made by splitting hydrogen from natural gas first.

This is more useful for producing methanol from biogas (i.e. waste facilities), since the gas is produced by bacteria as part of the natural decay process. It's an alternative to producing methane catalytically from hydrogen.

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