Green Methanol—An Important Pathway to Realize Carbon Neutrality
Junguo Li, Changning Wu, Daofan Cao, Shunxuan Hu, Li Weng, Ke Liu
Abstract
The key to realizing Carbon Peaking and Carbon Neutrality (Dual-Carbon) targets is to boost the generation of renewable energy like solar and wind energy. Taken into account the regional differences in China, the duration of solar energy provision diverges between 1100 to 2000 h per year, with merely a handful of regions exceeding the 2000 h threshold. This indicates that solar energy is cheaper than thermal power for a one-sixth to one-fifth of the time in a given year. However, for the rest of a given year, the cost of solar energy coupled with electricity storage will be much higher than thermal power. Wind power has a similar seasonal cost issue to solar energy. Thus, in order to promote the efficiency of power generation, it is necessary to develop a largescale energy storage technology that is economically feasible and can be promoted globally. One of the low-cost energy storage technologies that can address the demand for long-cycle energy storage is converting wind and solar energy into green methanol liquid. The innovation of the purposed methodology is the elimination of air separation and WGS units from the process, owing to the directed generated of electrolyzed green H2 and green O2 from renewable energy. Assuming that renewable energy is stable enough, the estimated production cost of green methanol is approximately 2491.3 yuan/ton. Based on existing liquid infrastructure, green methanol can fulfill the usage of internal combustion locomotives, hybrid augmentation vehicles, and hydrogen fuel cell cars to achieve green traffic. Additionally, the technology can also be used in a variety of distributed generation fields, providing the extra heating and cooling requirements. The findings of this investigation might be significant to realizing Carbon Peaking and Carbon Neutrality (Dual-Carbon) target.