[Gasification] [Stoves] Thanks to Tom Reed for His Perspective Setting Remarks on Methanol, the "Other" Alcohol

[Harmon Seaver]

On 7/6/06, Harry Stokes <hstokes at blazenet.net> wrote:
> Tom Reed's are words of wisdom.  As energy needy as the world is, we simply
> cannot rule methanol out.  We have lived for a 100 years with highly toxic
> petroleum fuels; surely we can learn how to use the environmentally benign
> alcohols, including methanol, safely.

  Nobody wants to rule out methanol -- but if it comes into wide use
as a common fuel, I think there will be a lot more poisonings of
clueless people.

> Since methanol is an easy and cheap
> way to use natural gas,

    Natural gas will be gone shortly. In North America, it is almost
gone now. In fact, in the winter of 2003, nat gas supplies in the US
got so low that gas companies had to use "triage" -- they cut off gas
to all industrial users that use it as a feedstock, and also to nat
gas fueled electrical power producers in order to keep homeowners from
freezing. Since then, we have been importing most gas from Canada, but
they too are going to run out very soon.
    One big problem with nat gas wells is, unlike water or oil wells,
there is almost no warning when they are empty. Just like when a
propane tank is empty -- one minute there is sufficient supply, next
it is gone. The US supply is essentially gone.
     Making methanol or hydrogen from nat gas is a very stupid idea at
this point. As is making fertilizer out of it, one of the major
sources of fertilizer in the present time. After the 2003 shortage,
most of the idustries using nat gas as a feedstock moved out of north
america.

>and since many of the poorest of the African
> countries do have non-commercial (in large scale terms) supplies of natural
> gas (enough to provide hundreds of years of cooking energy for those
> countries),

   Hundreds of years?? Are you kidding? It is quite questionable at
this point that there is even "hundreds of years" left of even coal.


> why not learn how to use methanol, as well as ethanol, safely
> and effectively?  These two alcohols go hand in hand; having recourse to one
> makes the other more feasible because, together, they may be able to provide
> the quantities necessary to make a dent in the need for clean cooking
> energy.

    The only place that alcohol (of any type) has a place as cooking
fuel is in places in the 3rd world that have no more wood.



> Nigeria is responsible for some 40% of all gas flared worldwide.  The World
> Bank is promoting large scale utilization of this gas, for example the
> construction of LNG facilities to freeze the gas and ship it to the West.
> This is an enormously expensive undertaking, which only the West can afford.

   Right -- and even the West can't afford it. LNG is an absurd idea
-- have you looked at the type of ship that is required to transport
it? And the port facilities on both ends -- horrendous dangers even
without the whole concept of world terrorism. Not to mention, of
course, the truly tiny amounts of gas that actually can be transported
that way.


> This same gas could be made cheaply and easily into methanol at the flow
> station or the wellhead for use as an all-purpose fuel for cooking,
> lighting, distributed electricity generation, and so on.  It would then be
> available for the Nigerian people themselves, who deeply resent their
> current state of deep energy poverty.

   Why not just keep it as nat gas and pipe it to the Nigerian cities?

> There is a lot of talk now in Nigeria
> about ethanol from cassava.  Shifting to an alcohol energy economy in
> Nigeria for domestic needs could make a lot of sense, wherein both ethanol
> and methanol would play a role.
>
> To put in perspective the amount of natural gas that Nigeria flares, there
> is enough gas flared to provide ample cooking energy for every family in all
> of West Africa on a daily basis.  This energy is currently going into the
> atmosphere as flared and vented gas, with enormous GHG commitment.
>

   One of the biggest problems in the world today it the vast
overestimate of both oil and gas supplies. By 2015, at their present
rate of growth, China alone will need 100% of world oil supply. We are
now at the actual peak of world oil supplies (and much of what's left
will be much harder to extract, like the tar sands and shale oil,
etc.) and world nat gas supplies is not far behind. Nat gas supplies
in NA is far beyond peak.


-- 
Harmon Seaver