LPMeOH®

{| align="left" style="max-width:56em; width:100%;" Liquid Process Methanol

Solid Catalyst Process
Traditionally, methanol has been produced by bringing compressed syngas into contact with a solid catalyst that's hot. The resulting reaction gives off heat (i.e., it's exothermic). While this means that given the right conditions the reaction will proceed without a need to continue heating the reactants, which is good, the reaction can easily become too hot, which is bad because overheating will ruin the catalyst.

The reaction generates heat on the surface of the catalyst, and the reaction's limiting factor is the inherently low heat transfer involved in interactions between a solid and a gas. In order to keep the reaction from proceeding too quickly and ruining the catalyst, the traditional practice was to throttle back the reaction by limiting the amount of CO in the syngas.

Process with Catalyst in Liquid Suspension
The liquid process route gets around this problem by grinding the catalyst into a powder (thereby increasing its surface area) and suspending it as a slurry in mineral oil. The syngas is then bubbled up through the slurry. Because the catalyst is immersed in a liquid, the reaction is able to take advantage of the much-more-rapid transfer of heat from a solid to a liquid.

The result is that an LPMeOH reactor can reliably generate more than five times as much methanol per pass through the reactor, which translates into considerable savings in the cost of compressing, heating, cooling and decompressing the syngas passing through the reactor. This also significantly lessens the problem of accumulating ever greater percentages of inert gases in the recirculating syngas.

Scalability
LPMeOH offers the ability to build a smaller plant than the behemoths that dominated the first fifty years of methanol synthesis, but that doesn't answer the question of whether the process could be scaled down to a size that lies within the scope of what a sustainable village could handle. The answer to that question can be found in the literature that describes how the design engineering was done for the "small scale" demonstration plant described in the link below. The report related that the test bench research was done using a reactor fabricated from a six foot length of one inch diameter stainless steel pipe.

Commercial-Scale Demonstration of the Liquid Phase Methanol Process
Click Here to view a detailed report on the Kingport, TN LPMeOH® plant prepared by Air Products for the US Department of Energy (DOE).

Economic Analysis of Air Product's LPMeOH® Process
Click Here to view an economic assessment of the Kingsport, TN LPMeOH® plant.

Note: LPMeOH® is a registered trademark of Air Products and Chemicals, Inc.
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