[Gasification] Re: County wide methanol project

[Keith Addison]

>  This conversation really belongs on the bioconversion list rather
>than gasification. But have you given any thought to just how toxic
>methanol is? Spill it on your hand while refueling and you probably
>won't survive the experience.
>
>--
>Harmon Seaver


More about methanol
http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_make.html#moremeth

Question: Just how dangerous is methanol?

Fact: Methanol is a poisonous chemical that can blind you or kill 
you, and as well as drinking it you can absorb it through the skin 
and breathe in the fumes.

Question: How much does it take to kill you?

Short answer: Anything from five teaspoons to more than half a pint, 
but nobody really knows.

Fact: Human susceptibility to the acute effects of methanol 
intoxication is extremely variable. The minimum dose of methanol 
causing permanent visual defects is unknown. The lethal dose of 
methanol for humans is not known for certain. The minimum lethal dose 
of methanol in the absence of medical treatment is put at between 0.3 
and 1 g/kg.

That means it's thought to take at least 20 grams of methanol to kill 
an average-sized person, or 25 ml, five teaspoonsful. Or it might 
need more than three times as much, 66 grams, 17 teaspoonsful, or 
maybe more, and even then it'll only kill you if you can't reach a 
doctor within a day or two, and maybe it still won't kill you.

But it definitely can kill you. If you drink five teaspoonsful of 
pure methanol you'll need medical treatment even if it doesn't kill 
you. Yet people have survived doses of 10 times as much -- a quarter 
of a litre, half a pint -- without any permanent harm. But others 
haven't survived much lower doses. Getting rapid medical attention is 
crucial, though the poisoning effects can be slow to develop.

Authorities advise that swallowing up to 1.3 grams or 1.7 ml of 
methanol or inhaling methanol vapour concentrations below 200 ppm 
should be harmless for most people. No severe effects have been 
reported in humans of methanol vapour exposures well above 200 ppm.

Out of 1,601 methanol poisonings reported in the US in 1987 the death 
rate was 0.375%, or 1 in 267 cases. It might have been only 1 in more 
than a thousand cases because most cases weren't reported. Most cases 
were caused by drinking badly made moonshine, which is a worldwide 
problem.

Fiction: "Methanol is ... a very active chemical against which the 
human body has no means of defence. It is absorbed easily through the 
skin and there is no means of elimination from the body, so levels of 
methanol dissolved in the blood accumulate."

That's from a British website trying to sell Straight Vegetable Oil 
(SVO) solvent additives by frightening people with the alleged perils 
of biodiesel. See The SVO vs biodiesel argument

Fact: 30 litres of fruit juice will probably contain up to 20 grams 
of methanol, near the official minimum lethal dose. Methanol is in 
the food we eat, in fresh fruit and vegetables, beer and wine, diet 
drinks, artificial sweeteners.

Not only that, methanol occurs naturally in humans. It's a natural 
component of blood, urine, saliva and the air you breathe out. It's 
there anyway even if you've never been exposed to chemical methanol 
or its fumes.

Methanol is eliminated from the body as a normal matter of course via 
the urine and exhaled air and by metabolism. Getting rid of it takes 
from a few hours for low doses to a day or two for higher doses. Some 
proportion of a dose of methanol just goes straight through, excreted 
by the lungs and kidneys unchanged. The normal background-level 
quantities of methanol in humans are eliminated and replenished all 
the time as a matter of course.

Fiction: It's largely biodiesel's methanol content that's being 
blamed when the same British SVO website charges that biodiesel is 
wasteful and environmentally irresponsible.

Fact: Methanol is readily biodegradable in the environment under both 
aerobic and anaerobic conditions (with and without oxygen) in a wide 
variety of conditions.

Generally 80% of methanol in sewage systems is biodegraded within 5 days.

Methanol is a normal growth substrate for many soil microorganisms, 
which completely degrade methanol to carbon dioxide and water.

Methanol is of low toxicity to aquatic and terrestrial organisms and 
it is not bioaccumulated. (It's toxic mainly to humans and monkeys.)

Environmental effects due to exposure to methanol are unlikely. 
Unless released in high concentrations, methanol would not be 
expected to persist or bioaccumulate in the environment. Low levels 
of release would not be expected to result in adverse environmental 
effects.

Fiction: A European SVO fuel website using similar anti-biodiesel 
tactics claims: "Biodiesel is a chemically altered plant oil. However 
the process to chemically change the structure of Pure Plant Oil is a 
very costly operation and requires a lot of energy, as it removes the 
glycerine substituting it by methanol as well as adding other 
chemicals, making the end-product poisonous and equally hazardous as 
fossil diesel fuel."

Fact: There is no free methanol in washed biodiesel. All the national 
standards require washing. According to US EPA studies methyl esters 
biodiesel is less toxic than table salt and more biodegradable than 
sugar. It has none of the toxic or environmental hazards of fossil 
diesel fuel.

To put it all in some perspective, methanol is the main or only 
ingredient in barbecue fuel or fondue fuel, sold in supermarkets and 
chain stores as "stove fuel" and used at the dinner table. It's also 
the main ingredient in the fuel kids use in their model aero engines.

Yes, methanol is a dangerous chemical, but quite how dangerous it may 
be is a little hard to say, and it causes surprisingly little harm. 
If you're careful and sensible and treat it with caution it won't 
harm you either. Many thousands of biodiesel homebrewers worldwide 
have been using it for years without serious mishap.

In our view, the difference between methanol and the really dangerous 
chemicals is that although methanol is poisonous, it's a natural 
chemical, you'd find it in the Garden of Eden too. It's not something 
nature's simply never heard of before and has no way of handling and 
neither do you, unlike too many of the 100,000-odd "new" chemicals 
now in use which aren't readily biodegradable and do accumulate, and 
spread, and keep being implicated in cancer clusters and bizarre 
sexual distortions of frogs and so on and on and on.

There are no reports of carcinogenic, genotoxic, reproductive or 
developmental effects in humans due to methanol exposure. Its 
environmental effects if any are minimal and short-lived.

Biodieselers can and do use methanol safely and the biodiesel fuel we 
make from it is safe and clean.

-- With information from: United Nations Environment Programme / 
International Labour Organisation / World Health Organization: 
International Programme On Chemical Safety, Environmental Health 
Criteria 196 - Methanol, from IPCS INCHEM, "Chemical Safety 
Information from Intergovernmental Organizations", in cooperation 
with the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS)
http://www.inchem.org/documents/ehc/ehc/ehc196.htm

See also:

Safety (MSDS) data for methyl alcohol
http://ptcl.chem.ox.ac.uk/MSDS/ME/methyl_alcohol.html

Methanol MSDS
http://www.bu.edu/es/labsafety/ESMSDSs/MSMethanol.html

Methanol as a plant nutrient

"Methanol is a fixed-carbon nutrient source for plants." -- From 
"Agriculture and Methanol", Chapter 7, Methanol Production and Use, 
ed. Wu-Hsun Cheng and Harold H. Kung, ISBN 0-8247-9223-8, 1994 (10th 
printing)

"Methanol treatments of C3 plants [most food crops] have been found 
to result in growth improvement... As a plant source of carbon, 
methanol is a liquid concentrate: 1 cc of methanol provides the 
equivalent fixed-carbon substrate of over 2,000,000 cc of ambient 
air... Methanol treatments are a means of placing carbon directly 
into the foliage... The application of 10-100% methanol to some crops 
increased photosynthetic productivity... The uptake of methanol by 
plants in light leaves no significant residual methanol above 
baseline as detectable by chromotography within 15-30 minutes of 
penetration. Treatment with methanol is therefore an inexpensive, 
safe, and effective means of providing plants with a source of fixed 
carbon and carbon dioxide... An economical means of inhibition of 
photorespiration has been sought for decades, and methanol may well 
provide the solution... The control of photorespiration across the 
food crops of the world could double yields." -- Greg Harbican and 
Peter G., Biofuel mailing list, 8 Sep 2004. For discussion see:
http://snipurl.com/j94f
Methanol and Plants
http://snipurl.com/j94e
Use for wash water - methanol

Note however that the authors of Methanol Production and Use caution 
that the application of methanol to crops still requires further 
study before we all "rush out to spray methanol".

Most of the excess methanol used in the biodiesel process ends up in 
the glycerine by-product layer, and the rest stays in the biodiesel. 
If you don't reclaim it for re-use (you should!) the portion that's 
in the biodiesel gets washed out when you wash the fuel, mostly with 
the first wash. The first wash-water probably won't contain more than 
5-6% methanol (as well as some sodium or potassium lye and some 
soap). You could try spraying it on half a small patch of weeds and 
don't spray the other half to see what happens. Choose a bright sunny 
day.