Green Methanol Production in Container Format

Chemistry

A research association is developing a sustainable and scalable process for methanol production.

Methanol is produced from fossil natural gas at a rate of more than 100 million tons per year. In view of the Paris Climate Agreement, the associated CO₂ emissions are unacceptable. This aspect is addressed by the research project "E4MeWi" under the leadership of Creative Quantum: Over the next three years, an interdisciplinary team of chemists and engineers will develop a container-sized chemical plant that will produce methanol from water, carbon dioxide and renewable energies in a highly efficient manner. This will enable small and medium-sized companies as well as regional suppliers to produce methanol in a decentralized and environmentally friendly way in a few years.

The research association consists of the startups Creative Quantum and Ineratec as well as the Leibniz Institute for Catalysis and the Ruhr-Universität Bochum and Chemiepark Bitterfeld-Wolfen. The project is being funded by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy with a total of 2 million euros for three years from November 1, 2020.

Using CO₂ emissions and electricity from renewable energies
The abbreviation E4MeWi stands for energy-efficient renewable energy-based methanol economy. The planned container-sized chemical plant is to demonstrate that methanol can be produced from sustainable sources by orders of magnitude faster and more energy-efficiently than before. A further goal of the project partners is to design the technology in such a way that methanol can be produced at competitive prices in places where cheap electricity meets local CO₂ emissions. In the vision of the project partners, wind power and waste incineration plants or solar energy and biogas plants could thus be brought together for a new added value, resulting in a sustainable source of raw materials for the chemical industry. The mobility sector is another target market for green methanol, which can be used as a fuel additive or for fuel cells.
Dr. Marek Checinski, CEO and co-founder of Creative Quantum from Berlin, is one of the inventors of the process innovations implemented in the project. His company uses computers to calculate the chemical and physical properties of substances and materials and elucidates chemical reactions and processes in detail. From his experience, "chemists are often skeptical and doubt that computers and modern algorithms can be used to evaluate and optimize completely new processes from scratch. Methanol is one of the most important chemicals on which we wanted to demonstrate this once". He developed the new capture and hydrogenation approach. Creative Quantum will now further improve this process in virtual space. Modern methods such as genetic algorithms and machine learning will be used.
From the RUB, the team around Prof. Ulf-Peter Apfel from Inorganic Chemistry is involved. His group is responsible for catalyst and reactor development for the electrochemical reduction of CO₂ to synthesis gas.

Press contact
Dr. Alexander Janz
Creative Quantum
Phone: +49 30 9599 911 88
e-mail: kontakt@e4mewi.de 

Prof. Ulf-Peter Apfel
Inorganic chemistry I
Faculty of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Ruhr University Bochum
Phone: +49 234 32 21831
e-mail: ulf.apfel@rub.de