Methanol Made from Natural Gas as Replacement for Gasoline by Richard Furman
Pitch
Methanol is an alternative to gasoline that is cleaner, lower cost, safer and made from abundant U.S. natural gas supplies.
Description
Summary
I believe that a new process can be developed for making methanol from natural gas that will be lower in cost than gasoline and lower in CO2 emissions. An example of such a process would be the combination of the new engine reformer process developed by Dr.Leslie Bromberg at MIT with the new methanol reactor developed by Dr[R1] . Richard Sapienza. The new engine reformer converts natural gas to syngas and the methanol reactor can then convert this syngas to methanol. Both process steps have been confirmed with laboratory testing. What is needed now is to integrate these two processes for commercialization. What is unique about the integration of these two processes is that the syngas product conditions from the engine reformer matches the input conditions for the methanol reactor. Therefore there is no additional compression process step which reduces costs and improves efficiency. If these two process steps can be combined at the commercial scale it will provide a transportation fuel to replace gasoline and will make use of our abundant U.S. natural gas supplies.
By:
Richard Furman
