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Ethanol vs. Methanol
By Mr Ethanol | June 12, 2008
Huffington Post:
Ethanol and biodiesel are dead, long live methanol! Methanol is the simplest alcohol, with one carbon atom; ethanol has two. Thus, given biomass, it should be cheaper to produce methanol than ethanol. Surely enough, in a comprehensive assessment Stone & Webster performed for the U.S. Department of Energy two decades ago, with the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute as an associate, this fact was confirmed.
However, methanol has a few flaws. First, if drunk, you can go blind. But, who drinks gasoline? Second, there was a time when methanol was used as the feedstock to produce MTBE as a gasoline additive. MTBE is carcinogenic. Methanol is not, just don’t drink it. Third, methanol can dissolve certain plastics and embrittle a some metals. So change the plastic and metals to avoid this problem.
Methanol has only half the energy content per gallon of gasoline. Ethanol is two-thirds the intensity of gasoline. However, a fuel cell powered vehicle is at least twice the efficiency of an internal combustion engine, so the tank storage problem would be solved with a direct methanol fuel cell. The DMFC for portable electronics is said to soon replace batteries, so the technology is real.
Methanol is the only biofuel capable of being directly fed to a fuel cell. Ethanol and gasoline need to first be passed through an expensive reformer.
Plus, and this is difficult to accept, but true: one gallon of methanol has more hydrogen than one gallon of liquid hydrogen. Thus, the infrastructure is already largely in place for a methanol economy. George Olah in his book, Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol
Economy, provides all the science and speculation you need.
So why is our country and rest of world enamored over ethanol and biodiesel? Read on.
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