The Energy Blog

Alternative Liquid Fuels from Nuclear Hydrogen and CO2 Emissions

MIT conducted a study, An Alternative to Gasoline: Synthetic Fuels from Nuclear Hydrogen and Captured CO₂, to determine the extent to which nuclear power can contribute to a transition in the transportation sector.

The study concluded that the concept of alternative liquid fuels produced from nuclear hydrogen and captured carbon dioxide is viable. There is abundant CO₂ for use and the hydrogen can be produced with proven technology.

Combining hydrogen with carbon dioxide captured from fossil fired plants to produce liquid fuel, either ethanol or methanol, is a way of producing fuels that could be used with little modification in the production of vehicles, requires few changes in the infrastructure for distributing fuels and is complementary to the production of ethanol from biosources.

A total cycle analysis revealed that the total reduction in CO₂ emissions will be slightly more than 12% for either ethanol use or methanol use. A second benefit would be to decrease a nation’s dependence on imported petroleum.

About Methanol

I recently read two related articles regarding methanol which were somewhat conflicting and perked my interest in methanol.  The first was the announcement of a new plant for producing methanol.

Methanol Holdings (Trinidad) Limited (MHTL) announced that its M5000 methanol plant achieved first methanol production on September 23, 2005 and expected to achieve full production of 5400 tons per day, making it the largest methanol plant in the world, during the first week of October.  The total production capacity of MHTL's four plants is now about 4 million metric tons per annum (11,000 tons per day).

My immediate naive reaction was that converting stranded natural gas to methanol was an inexpensive way, less expensive than FT synthesis, to convert the gas to a liquid which would make the transportation much less complex (stranded gas refers to gas that is not in sufficient supply to justify converting it to LNG).  Methanol could be used as a vehicular fuel, so there should be a market for it.  Shortly after I saw the above announcement I saw an article in the Oil & Gas Journal about an overcapacity situation in methanol.  According to the article:

During its 5-year study period, beginning in 2006, CMAI in its 2006 World Methanol Analysis, forecasts world demand for methanol to be about 38 million tonnes/year. Meanwhile, nearly 27 million tpy of new capacity is planned for the same period and most expansions are not demand-driven, it said.

The largest absolute growth for methanol will be fueled by the Middle East and Northeast Asia, most notably China, as this country continues to build infrastructure to support its economic development.

Methanol demand in North America will decline as the methyl tertiary butyl ether phase-out programs sweep the US by 2007. This will eliminate the use of 9 million tonnes of MT BE by 2008, the equivalent of more than 3 million tonnes of methanol. Also, Europe is rapidly replacing MT BE with biofuels. It is expected to reduce MT BE production by 1.8 million tonnes (about 600,000 tonnes of methanol) from the 2000 peak consumption time frame to the end of the study period.

CMAI said the probability is high for the planned methanol-to-olefins complex in Nigeria in 2009. This addition, which will interact independent of the methanol industry and derivatives, will create almost 2.2 million tonnes of new demand.