Chemistry Nobel Laureate writes a monograph on the methanol economy.

[NNadir]

Since winning the Nobel for his work on carbocation chemistry, George Olah has devoted significant energy (pun intended) to the methanol powered fuel cell.

I am suspicious of methanol on toxicity grounds, but I do note that methanol can be synthesized by hydrogenation of CO2. Even better it is an excellent intermediate in the preparation of dimethyl ether, which can be used to power chainsaws in maine.

Here is the book, from my favorite scientific publishing house, John Wiley and Sons:

http://www.wiley-vch.de/templates/pdf/3527312757_c01.pdf



Some quotes from the sample chapter:

Synthetic oil is feasible, its production having been proven feasible from coal or natural gas via synthesis-gas, a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen obtained from the incomplete combustion of coal or natural gas (which are themselves non-renewable). Coal conversion was used in Germany during World War II and in South Africa during the boycott years of the Apartheid era. Nevertheless, the size of these operations hardly amounted to 0.3% of the present United States consumption. This route – the so-called Fischer–Tropsch synthesis – is also highly energy consuming, giving complex, unsatisfactory product mixtures, and can hardly be seen as the technology of the future. To utilize still-existing large natural gas reserves, their conversion to liquid fuels through syn-gas is presently developed for example on a large scale in Qatar, where major oil companies including ExxonMobil, Shell or ChevronTexaco, have recently committed over $20 billion to the construction of gas-to-liquid (GTL) facilities, mainly to produce sulfur-free diesel
fuel. However, when completed, this will provide a daily total of some 100 000 t compared with present world use of transportation fuels in excess of 6 Mt per day...

...CO2 can, as mentioned earlier, even now be readily recovered from flue gas emissions of power plants burning carbonaceous fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas), from fermentation processes, and from the calcination of limestone (cement production), production of steel, or other industrial sources. As these plants emit very large amounts of CO2 they contribute to the so-called “greenhouse warming effect” of our planet, which is causing grave environmental concern. The relationship between the atmospheric CO2 content and temperature was first studied scientifically by Arrhenius as early as 1898. The warming trend of our Earth can be evaluated only over longer time periods, but there is clearly a relationship between the CO2 content in the atmosphere and Earth’s temperature. Recycling CO2 into methanol (or dimethyl ether) and, through this into useful fuels and synthetic hydrocarbons and products, will not only help to alleviate the question of our diminishing fossil fuel resources, but at the same time help to mitigate global warming caused at least in part by man-made greenhouse gases. One highly efficient method of producing electricity directly from fuels is achieved in fuel cells via their catalytic electrochemical oxidation, primarily that of hydrogen.

As always, I prefer dimethyl ether to methanol, on toxicity grounds, but this is damn interesting work.