Methanol production using hydrogen from concentrated solar energy

Abstract

Future fuels have been selected and modeled using commercial simulation software. These 4 future fuels are syngasoline, syndiesel, ethanol and methanol where they can be seen as a very good substitute for current transportation fuels. Syngas is converted into aforementioned fuels using either Fischer-Tropsch or plug-flow reactor. The reactor is modeled taking into account the kinetic of reaction for each fuel, while in case of the absence of kinetic, a stoichiometric approach is implemented. The metric used to evaluate the plants are production cost in €/L and overall thermal efficiency. The results show that aforementioned conversion pathway yields higher production costs compared to current market while the lowest production cost is obtained for Methanol at 1.42 €/L. It is shown that solid to solid heat exchanger (STS) efficiency plays a major role in order to make the plant more economically viable. Combining electricity supply of Photovoltaic (PV) and CSP is also shown to be one way to reduce the production cost. If the plant combines PV-CSP is used as the electricity source, syngasoline emerges to be the closest proposed plant to current market fuel production cost with a production cost of 5.99 €/L at the base case scenario which corresponds to 622% relative difference with current market’s production cost and 2.87 €/L at the best case scenario which corresponds to 245% relative difference with current market’s production cost. At the base case scenario, the highest overall thermal efficiency is obtained for the syngasoline plant (4.05%) and at the best case scenario for the ethanol plant (9.2%).