World’s First Commercial CO2 to Methanol Plant

• Main Author: Richter, Christaan
• Other Authors: Georgia Institute of Technology. School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Iceland
• Format: Lecture
• Language: English
• Published: Georgia Institute of Technology 2019
• Subjects: Carbon utilization; CO2; Methanol; Iceland
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1853/61845

Presented on August 28, 2019 from 3:00 p.m.-4:00 p.m. in the Molecular Science and Engineering Building (MoSE), Room G011, Georgia Tech. Christiaan Richter is a professor in chemical engineering at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik. Prior to relocating to Iceland in 2016 he was a founding faculty member of the chemical engineering program at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He completed a postdoc at Yale, and has a PhD from Northeastern University and an MS & BS from the University of Nebraska. Runtime: 53:56 minutes The George Olah CO2 to methanol plant, commissioned in April 2012, currently produces ~ 5 million liters/year renewable methanol and capture and convert up to ~ 5600 ton CO2/year [Lim 2016, Nature, 526(630)]. This Carbon Recycling International (CRI) plant is located in Svartsengi, near Grindavik, Iceland. The process was originally developed by a small CRI team in Reykjavik, and has undergone several iterations to arrive at the present state of technology and functionality. Taking the process from pilot scale to industrial scale was not trivial. Several difficulties encountered along the way were resolved to arrive at the current robust version of the technology. The high purity renewable methanol currently produced is sold as gasoline additive, similar to ethanol in the USA. Perhaps the most consequential lesson learned from this enterprise is that producing methanol from CO2 need not be as expensive as most experts estimated; the production cost of the ‘green methanol’ produced at the George Olah plant is only approximately twice that of natural gas derived methanol. A second interesting lesson involves the optimal process configuration: There exist two viable catalytic routes to convert CO2 to methanol. The most familiar option is to first reduce CO2 to CO through the RWGS reaction and then reduce CO with H2 to methanol in a second step or reactor. The CRI process instead implements the direct hydrogenation of CO2 with H2 over a mixed metal oxide catalyst. The presentation ...