Low Impact Methanol Production from Sulfur Rich Coal Gasification

Abstract

In economy nowadays, methanol is already a key compound widely employed as building block for producing intermediates or synthetic hydrocarbons, solvent, energy storage medium, and fuel. In recent times, methanol has been employed in a number of innovative applications. It is a clean and sustainable energy resource that can be produced starting from different sources traditional or renewable: natural gas, coal, biomass, landfill gas and power plant/industrial emissions. In this work is proposed an innovative low impact process for methanol production starting from coal gasification. The most important features, instead the traditional ones, are the lower emissions of CO2 (about 2.5%) and the surplus production of methanol (about 1.7%) without any addiction of primary sources. Moreover, it is demonstrated that a coal charges with a high sulfur content means a higher reduction of CO2 emissions. The key idea is the application of AG2STM technology that is a completely new effective route of processing acid gases: H2S and CO2 are converted into syngas (CO and H2) by means of a regenerative thermal reactor.