A favorite of race car drivers, methanol is a highly versatile fuel with better efficiency than gasoline. Less expensive than the latter and safer to handle than hydrogen, it also powers industrial machines and electrical power plants. As innovative production technologies to synthesize methanol from renewable sources make the news—from CO2 to carbon nanotubes and the artificial leaf—Eni announces three new partnerships in this exciting field.
Race car drivers know it well: methanol increases an engine's energy efficiency, allowing for their turbocharging and supercharging, among other things. Not just that: the highly versatile fuel has countless applications, from electricity production to powering industrial machinery. It is also used as a feedstock for plastic production and as a solvent in the chemical industry. And it is safer to transport and handle than natural gas and hydrogen.
As methanol burns in a more efficient way than gasoline, it also emits less carbon monoxide and other pollutants, including particulate matter. What's more, methanol can be produced from renewable sources such as solid urban waste, and transported using the existing gasoline infrastructure with no need to adapt it, something which cannot be done with hydrogen.
The best news is methanol can be synthesised from CO2 itself. Under the right conditions, it can gain a very prominent place in a circular economy, allowing us to reuse the same CO2 we produce (for instance, in industrial settings). But its potential is even bigger: by producing methanol from CO2, we would be taking what now is waste—in the stronger sense of the word—and turning it into a chemical raw material.
This is the idea at the core of chemist George Olah's 2006 bestseller “Beyond Oil and Gas: the Methanol Economy". In it, the 1994 Nobel Prize winner makes the case for a methanol economy—one in which methanol synthesised from renewable sources is used as primary energy vector to lessen dependency from finite fossil resources such as oil and coal.
In 2019, methanol has been a major focus of Eni's R&D program “Energy Transition". The company recently announced three new partnerships for methanol production, of which two use renewable sources.
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Professor Olah, awarded with the 1994 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, advocated for a "methanol economy"
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