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Author Topic: Converting to a methanol economy ?  (Read 3653 times)

morganism

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Converting to a methanol economy ?
« on: August 02, 2014, 10:08:34 PM »
There are quite a few new catalysts to directly convert CO2 to methanol, but this new one is efficient enough to use waste heat from an engine or industrial process to perhaps re-capture in-situ.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/nanostructured-metal-oxide-catalyst-efficiently-converts-co2-to-methanol#

There is also a neat thermalelectric converter that uses the edge of benzene or zigzag graphene to convert heat directly to electricity. Studies were done at UofAz.

http://uanews.org/story/turning-waste-heat-power

http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/news/penn-study-understanding-graphene-s-electrical-properties-atomic-level

morganism

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Re: Converting to a methanol economy ?
« Reply #1 on: July 05, 2022, 08:49:11 PM »
Found: The 'holy grail of catalysis'—turning methane into methanol under ambient conditions using light.

"An international team of researchers, led by scientists at the University of Manchester, has developed a fast and economical method of converting methane, or natural gas, into liquid methanol at ambient temperature and pressure. The method takes place under continuous flow over a photo-catalytic material using visible light to drive the conversion."
(snip)

"The method involves a continuous flow of methane/oxygen-saturated water over a novel metal-organic framework (MOF) catalyst. The MOF is porous and contains different components that each have a role in absorbing light, transferring electrons and activating and bringing together methane and oxygen. The liquid methanol is easily extracted from the water. Such a process has commonly been considered "a holy grail of catalysis" and is an area of focus for research supported by the U.S. Department of Energy. Details of the team's findings, titled "Direct photo-oxidation of methane to methanol over a mono-iron hydroxyl site," are published in Nature Materials."

"To greatly simplify the process, when methane gas is exposed to the functional MOF material containing mono-iron-hydroxyl sites, the activated oxygen molecules and energy from the light promote the activation of the C-H bond in methane to form methanol," said Sihai Yang, a professor of chemistry at Manchester and corresponding author. "The process is 100% selective—meaning there is no undesirable by-product—comparable with methane monooxygenase, which is the enzyme in nature for this process."

The experiments demonstrated that the solid catalyst can be isolated, washed, dried and reused for at least 10 cycles, or approximately 200 hours of reaction time, without any loss of performance."

https://phys.org/news/2022-06-holy-grail-catalysisturning-methane-methanol.html

Direct photo-oxidation of methane to methanol over a mono-iron hydroxyl site, Nature Materials (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41563-022-01279-1. www.nature.com/articles/s41563-022-01279-1


sidd

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Re: Converting to a methanol economy ?
« Reply #2 on: July 06, 2022, 10:32:29 AM »
Cool! Now go a lil further and add an extra carbon and a couple hydrogen, and that's a product with potential ...burn it, trade it, drink it as necessary ...

sidd

morganism

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Re: Converting to a methanol economy ?
« Reply #3 on: January 08, 2024, 09:09:09 PM »
(xpost for search purposes)

Chinese scientists have developed a low-cost method of converting coal into protein for use in animal feed. Photo: Shutterstock
ChinaScience
Chinese scientists convert coal into protein to answer animal feed demand

    After studying thousands of samples, a Chinese team has developed a method of creating protein using methanol derived from coal

    This will help provide a low-cost solution to the growing need for animal feed, which is surging due to the rising global population

(...)
His team has now developed a protein production technology that is cheaper than traditional protein biosynthesis. The findings were published in the peer-reviewed journal Biotechnology for Biofuels and Bioproducts on November 17 last year.

The yeast strain Pichia pastoris (P. pastoris), used in this process, grows by using methanol. But because methanol is toxic and has complex pathways, about 20 per cent of it is wasted. It turns into carbon dioxide and water instead of being used for protein synthesis, which reduces the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the process.

“Research on synthesising cellular protein from methanol began in the 1980s, focusing mainly on strain selection and production process optimisation. Yet, due to high costs, methanol-synthesised protein products could not compete with soy protein and have not been produced on a large scale,” Wu said in the paper.
Food science breakthroughs can’t come fast enough for a warming world

To solve the problem, his team collected more than 20,000 yeast samples from vineyards, forests and marshlands across China. From those samples, they identified strains capable of efficiently using various sugars and alcohols as carbon sources.
And by knocking out specific genes in a wild-type Pichia pastoris strain, they engineered a yeast with significantly improved methanol tolerance and metabolic efficiency. This engineering dramatically boosted the targeted conversion of methanol to protein.

“The researchers achieved a dry cell weight and crude protein content of 120g/litre and 67.2 per cent with their modified P. pastoris. And the methanol-to-protein conversion efficiency reached 92 per cent of the theoretical value,” a report on the CAS website said.

The high conversion rate makes this protein production method very attractive economically.
“It doesn’t require arable land, is unaffected by seasons and climate, and is a thousand times more efficient than traditional agricultural practices,” Wu said in the paper.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3247350/chinese-scientists-convert-coal-protein-answer-animal-feed-demand-major-breakthrough


(cant find the paper here, maybe look for the Georgia angle)
https://biotechnologyforbiofuels.biomedcentral.com/articles

morganism

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Re: Converting to a methanol economy ?
« Reply #4 on: January 20, 2024, 11:00:14 PM »
 Backing Up the Power Grid With Green Methanol

A closed-loop storage-plus-power system stockpiles renewable energy wherever it's needed

 It would be great if everyone could back up the intermittent power from wind and solar plants with energy stored as low-cost, zero-carbon hydrogen gas. But hydrogen can be hard to store.

Last month, when the Royal Society advised the British government to start building underground caverns to store megatons of hydrogen gas, it noted that the United Kingdom would need to store 1,000 times as much energy in this way as its pumped hydropower reservoirs can hold, and far more than batteries can feasibly provide. And the U.K. is fortunate to have hollowed-out underground salt deposits in which to put the gas. Others do not. The Pacific coast of the United States, for instance, has no appropriate geological formations. They are also rare across China, Africa, and South America.

Such cavern-challenged places may instead benefit from a creative workaround developed by German researchers: converting hydrogen to methanol. “Methanol presents a nice alternative to hydrogen, since as a liquid you can store it in tanks anywhere,” says energy-modeling expert Tom Brown, who heads the Department of Digital Transformation in Energy Systems at the Technische Universität Berlin.

Today in the journal Joule, Brown and Johannes Hampp, a doctoral researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, in Germany, report that storing energy as methanol can be cost effective. The key is to integrate equipment producing hydrogen, methanol, and electricity, all of which are being commercialized or are in industrial development.

Low-carbon methanol production is already scaling up to replace the dirty bunker fuel that propels big ships. And the specific type of power generator required has been demonstrated at a 25-megawatt plant in Texas.

The LaPorte, Texas, generating station, covered by IEEE Spectrum in 2018 along with process inventor Rodney Allam, burns natural gas with pure oxygen from a dedicated air separator. The Allam cycle, which bears his name, combusts fuel in a circulating stream of carbon dioxide that’s heated and compressed to form a pseudoliquid known as a supercritical fluid. After the supercritical gas expands to drive a turbine generator, excess carbon dioxide created by the combustion reaction is easily bled off. This allows a process to capture the carbon without the inefficiencies associated with separating carbon dioxide from a regular turbine’s exhaust.

NET Power, the LaPorte plant’s developer may sell the captured carbon dioxideto oil fields, which use it to boost petroleum extraction. That would diminish the Allam cycle’s climate-benefiting effect. But investors seem unfazed: NET Power raised over US $675 million earlier this year to build a 300-MW commercial-scale plant in Texas, which the company plans to start operating in 2026.

Repurposing the Allam cycle to burn methanol in an all-renewable energy system was first proposed in 2019 by engineers at the Netherlands’ University of Twente. Their integrated storage system, a closed loop that contains the Allam cycle, works as follows:

    Electrolysis splits water molecules into their constituent elements, hydrogen and oxygen;
    Hydrogen is made to react with carbon dioxide, producing methanol;
    Methanol is stored in tanks until required as a backup for shortfalls in renewable power     generation;
    Methanol and oxygen are burned in the Allam cycle to generate power; and
    Surplus carbon dioxide loops back to step No. 2, where it is used to synthesize more methanol.

(more)

https://spectrum.ieee.org/methanol-energy-storage