(621dl) Methanol Synthesis from CO2 and H2

METHANOL SYNTHESIS FROM CO₂ AND H₂

CO₂ capturing is gaining more support from both government and industries in the recent years, despite the increase in investment and research activities in the subject the technology still not close to commercialization. The major challenges hindering deployment of the technology on a commercial scale is high capital investment attributed to both development and operation (CAPEX and OPEX respectively). Due to lack of profit benefit connection with deployment of the technology despite the high investment cost, no company in the world is interested in investing on the CO₂ capturing project until alternative utilization of captured CO₂become economic viable. On this note, the research is gradually shifting from carbon capture and storage (CCS) toward carbon capture, utilization and storage. 

Several application options had been identified in which majority are not economic attractive while some has economical successful and move to commercialization. Some of the proposed utilization include: as a feedstock for industrial product, mineralization, Enhance oil and gas recovery (EOR), Enhanced Coal-Bed Methane (ECBM), CO₂ conversion to chemical feedstock and fuels, biological conversion (photosynthesis) processes, and CO₂ mineralization for the production of materials (Faruqe H., et al. 2014). Enhanced oil production technique has been in used in North America (Canada and USA) for over  40 years in depleted oilfields, however CO₂ that were used are not captured so we cannot categorically say that CO₂-EOR is economical though many researchers had proven that evening if CO₂ is to be purchased for EOR it would still be economical viable. Other researchers claimed that CO₂-EOR is only viable option of CO₂ utilization.  This statement then called a question to be answered , if CO₂-EOR is the only attractive CO₂ utilization  option then why are we capturing the CO₂in the first instance since we are using it to produce more fossil fuels.

The challenge for other utilization options investigation become an importance issue if our primary objective of capturing the CO₂ is to combat the environmental impact  caused by greenhouse gases in which CO₂ is take the highest percent in atmosphere approximately 0.04%. Having evaluated all the options, we felt utilizing the greenhouse gas CO₂ as a feedstock in chemical processing would offer an alternative solution for the utilization. Large-scale production methanol (MeOH) which is light hydrocarbons that could offer an alternation energy source is one of the predominant and sensible schemes for CO₂ utilization. Though, there is any economic assessment so far that has proven that methanol production from CO₂ could offset the huge capital investment associated with carbon capture plant. In our laboratory we  are proposing to synthesized catalyst that would optimize methanol synthesis  via the reaction of CO₂ with H₂ and/or CH₄ and conduct a techno-economic assessment for the   process to determine the possibilities of commercialization of the process and ultimately, top offer a promising alternative utilization scheme for CO₂with potential of commercialization.

Our research aim is to produced methanol at relatively lower pressure and temperature with high methanol selectivity and yield percentage.