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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

#31

Post by projektfu »

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.

Above its critical point, (-82.59°C) it won't condense into a liquid. It will continue compressing into a supercritical fluid, which will take a very high pressure to equal the density of liquid methane. The gas is about 0.7g/L at STP, the liquid is 422g/L at 1 atm at its boiling point. You'd need 600 atmospheres or 8862 PSI. A typical cylinder is around 2500-3000 psi.

Liquid methane is distributed refrigerated.

Re: Researchers successfully convert methane gas into liquid methanol

#33

Post by zdragnar »

drtwitch wrote: post #26
99112000 wrote: post #25

> Our success in obtaining methanol under mild conditions, while also expending less energy, is a major step forward. The energy it took to produce the liquid methanol was higher than what the output can produce. Spending 2 liter of fuel to recover 1 liter of fuel. Well.. you do the maths. Good to see progress though!

That's pretty much standard with chemistry. Have fun trying to violate thermodynamics.

I suspect the point is that we would be better off just burning the methane at the source and putting the energy we would have used converting it to methanol instead towards whatever energy the methanol would have eventually been used for.

Spending $1 today to get $0.50 tomorrow isn't a good idea.

Re: Researchers successfully convert methane gas into liquid methanol

#34

Post by fuzzfactor »

dbcooper wrote: post #29

Conversion of methane into methanol is a large scale industrial process that underpins much of the chemical industry. This post's title is misleading, and the original title is slightly more informative: "New Method Converts Greenhouse Gas Into Fuel".

>Conversion of methane into methanol is a large scale industrial process

Since the 1980's.

I hope it's a new method and more energy efficient (that's what happened then), but producers are turning as much natural gas into methanol as the current market can handle already.

Which the market was already that way before the 1980's came along too.

Re: Researchers successfully convert methane gas into liquid methanol

#35

Post by coderenegade »

zdragnar wrote: post #33
drtwitch wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty much standard with chemistry. Have fun trying to violate thermodynamics.

I suspect the point is that we would be better off just burning the methane at the source and putting the energy we would have used converting it to methanol instead towards whatever energy the methanol would have eventually been used for. Spending $1 today to get $0.50 tomorrow isn't a good idea.

It really depends. Methanol is liquid at STP conditions, whereas methane isn't, and either needs to be stored under pressure or cryogenically. Methane also boils off, leaks, and is a potent greenhouse gas. Methanol breaks down naturally in the environment, etc.

Most appeals to the second law of thermodynamics are meaningless without additional context. We routinely make energy and chemical conversions that lose recoverable energy, but we do so because either we need the feedstock for something, or because things like fungibility and storage matter.

I mean let's be candid, the folks working on this have likely forgotten more about thermodynamics than most folks here have ever learnt. Methane to methanol has been a holy grail of chemical engineering for a while, and I'd imagine there's a lot more to it than first year physics.

Re: Researchers successfully convert methane gas into liquid methanol

#36

Post by jdadj »

anonporridge wrote: post #12
sfink wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

“Burning it efficiently on site” might not be as easy as previously thought.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/29/climate/gas-flaring-clima...

Re: Researchers successfully convert methane gas into liquid methanol

#37

Post by fian »

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.

Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) is mostly methane with some ethane and is typically transported in cryogenic containers as it would require too much pressure to otherwise keep it in a liquid state. Even when transported in cryogenic tanks there is some boil off that is either captured and recompressed or used as fuel for the tanker.

Liqified Petroleum Gas (LPG) is a mixture of propane and butane which does not require cryogenic storage and will remain liquid.

Re: Researchers successfully convert methane gas into liquid methanol

#38

Post by jillesvangurp »

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…

Another company in this space is Lanzatech. Michael Liebreich had the CEO on his podcast a few weeks ago: https://www.cleaningup.live/ep100-dr-jennifer-holmgren-brewi...

They actually are able to convert co2 directly (using microbes) but also work with methane from e.g. waste.

Re: Researchers successfully convert methane gas into liquid methanol

#40

Post by mahkeiro »

notorandit wrote: post #39

> methane, a potent greenhouse gas, to be utilized to make fuel So you can burn it and release a different greenhouse gas. Total result: more energy used and more heath released into the atmosphere. Very cool.

Methane can be fully neutral when produced from biomass (and this is not a marginal use) Storing the energy as a liquid rather than a gas can also provide some advantage like for fuel cells.
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