Japanese test DME plant (100MT/day) tests wood as a starting material.

[NNadir]

DME, dimethyl ether, is in the early phases of industrialization. This flexible fuel, suitable for use in diesel engines without much modification, also can replace natural gas, liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), refrigerants and other CFC and HFC applications, and can, theoretically at least, be used to store off-peak energy such as wind power that may be available at night. Potentially the fuel could also be used to convert nuclear energy into motor fuels. As a gas with a critical temperature higher than the boiling temperature of water, it can be shipped and stored as a liquid without refrigeration in all weather extremes.

As an environmental fuel, it is nearly ideal. DME exhibits low toxicity, and a very, very short atmospheric lifetime, a few days. This limits it's potential greenhouse gas potential. In fact, its only environmental draw back is that it's decomposition in the atmosphere gives the same products as methane (natural gas)

Asia has already begun to build a commercial infrastructure for the use of DME has a motor fuel and for use in power plants.

I have discussed some details elsewhere previously about this infrastructure:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=115&topic_id=60314

Unfortunately, as DME is a very simple molecule, one may think of it as methylated water, it is accessible through many starting materials, some better than others. Japan, Qatar, Iran and other nations are making DME from natural gas. This allows the shipping of so called "stranded natural gas" that cannot be economically shipped as gaseous methane, but can be shipped as the pressurized liquid DME.

Natural gas is, of course, environmentally unacceptable, as it is a fossil fuel.

It is also industrially planned to make DME from coal, the worst of the three terrible fossil fuels. Although the DME so produced will burn more cleanly than simply burning coal directly, the matter remains of the fact that nobody knows how to dispose of the most dangerous form of energy waste known, carbon dioxide. (This carbon dioxide is temporarily sequestered in the DME itself, but is released when the motor fuel is burned in an IC engine or turbine.) Obviously DME from coal is unacceptable from an environmentalist view point.

The Japanese and the Swedes however, are both working on DME provided through the agency of biomass, specifically wood products. For the Swedes, it's mostly - like the vast majority of renewable energy schemes - it's mostly talk. The Japanese however have built a demonstration plant that they are using to test multiple sources of DME. Specifically they are using waste plastic - a portion of the garbage that in the US is classified as "renewable" energy - plastic mixed with wood side products - and wood side products neat.

The plant has been running since 2002. (A smaller pilot plant at 5MT/day ran in the late 1990's.) It has tested the economics of these various products and the information is available on line in the form of presentation slides:

http://www.ecotraffic.se/synbios/konferans/presentationer/19_maj/synbios_omiya_mamoru.pdf#search=%22dme%20plant%20biomass%22

If you are interested in how much energy 100MT/day of DME represents, of course, 36,500MT/year. The energy value of DME is about 29 billion joules per ton. A barrel of oil is about 6.1 billion joules. Thus the demonstration plant produces the equivalent of around 17,300 barrels of oil per year.

The plant has been scaled to such a level that it can now go industrial. The matter is, of course, a function of cost. If the DME from biomass is more expensive than coal based or natural gas based DME, this speaks to the need for an international carbon tax.

My personal favorite means for producing DME in the long term, is hydrogenation of carbon dioxide, possibly in an Olah type reversible fuel cell. Hydrogen, like the DME it could be used to manufacture, is available from many potential sources, including the cleanest form of scalable continuous energy known, nuclear energy.

Edited for factor of ten mistake.