What Did You Know About Methanol? Benefit And Synthesis.

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Methanol can be produced from natural gas, coal and renewable sources such as municipal waste, biomass and recycled carbon dioxide.

CO + 2H2 ----> CH3OH

Methanol is an alcohol that has four parts hydrogen, one part oxygen and one part carbon.
Methanol is predominantly produced from natural gas by reforming the gas with steam and then converting and distilling the resulting synthesized gas mixture to create pure methanol.

Methanol is used to produce chemicals such as acetic acid and formaldehyde, which can into useful products.

Methanol can be used on a vehicle as a fuel or blended directly into gasoline to produce a high-octane, efficient fuel with lower emissions than conventional gasoline. Methanol is also
known as a clean-burning marine fuel that can cost-effectively meet the shipping industry’s increasingly stringent emissions regulations.

Did Methanol has benefit as a fuel?

Yes it is, this is because methanol has a low-emission fuel
Basically, methanol is a clean-burning fuel that produces fewer smog-causing emissions, so this can improve air quality and related air pollution issues.

Then, methanol can be made from a variety of sources.
Commonly methanol was produced from natural gas or syngas. It can also be produced from renewable sources such as biomass and recycled carbon dioxide or anything. Interesting right? So in the future, we have not too worried about the insufficient source of fuel anymore.

Methanol is recognized as a high octane vehicle fuel
This type of fuel is known for its excellent acceleration and power. It also improves vehicle efficiency.

The most important thing is methanol fuel is economically.
Methanol can be produced, distributed and sold to consumers at prices competitive to those of gasoline and diesel with no need for government subsidies.

Methanol also accessible around the world.
It is on the top five chemical commodities shipped around the world each year, and unlike some of the alternative fuels. They are readily accessible through existing global terminal infrastructure. Many country or vehicle that use this fuel as their alternative way to substitute for petrol or diesel.

So how they made methanol?

Like I state before, there are many ways to produce methanol but the most common way is from syngas.





Or there is a new research that makes a direct methanol synthesis from methane in a plasma-catalyst hybrid system at low temperature using metal oxide-coated glass beads.

They used a plasma-catalyst to synthesize methanol directly from methane. A dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) plasma combined with the plasma catalyst in order to overcome the difficulties of catalyst-only batch reactions such as high reaction pressure and separation of a liquid product. At first the transition metal oxides, Mn2O3-coated glass bead showed the highest methanol yield of about 12.3%. The temperature were keep constant under 100 °C at the time of the reaction.

One more thing, without changing the selectivity, the reactivity of the catalyst was maintained for 10 hr. This lead to the plasma-induced OH radical might be produced on the Mn2O3 catalyst.
The purpose of this study is to introduces the plasma that can overcome such difficulties. Which now, we know that plasma can produce a methyl radical at lower temperatures by activating the methane. This plasma can be divided into two, which is known as thermal plasma and non-thermal plasma. In the thermal plasma condition, the temperatures of electron, ion, and radical become identical. So, when the electron temperature is high, the temperature of the bulk gas that can be maintained at low temperature.

This is because the mass of electron that is accelerated by the plasma is very light, which increase the gas temperature by only a few degrees. At a certain point, the reaction atmosphere can remain isothermal condition. Because of this situation, a structural variation of the catalyst can be hardly created in non-thermal plasma condition using a simple reactor configuration.

In conclusion, they select DBD plasma as a plasma source in this study. The system was designed to help to improve the methanol selectivity in a continuous packed bed reactor. The good thing is during the reaction process it does not require separation and regeneration.

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REFERENCES OR FURTHER READING :
1.Heesoo Lee, School of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Institute of Chemical Processes, Seoul National University, 1 Gwanak-ro, Gwanak-gu, Seoul, 08826, Republic of Korea "Direct methanol synthesis from methane in a plasma-catalyst hybrid system at low temperature using metal oxide-coated glass beads"

2.Comparison between two methods of methanol production from carbon dioxide

3.Methanol

4.Methanol: Theessentialchemicalindustry

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Disclaimer : I am not an expert. I wrote based on my understanding and my experience. Maybe some of it is not accurately from the fact. If I make something wrong, feel free to drop a comment.