Unmanned-Power-to-Methanol-production

It is a great challenge to upgrade decentralized CO2 point-sources to production sites for renewable fuels. These CO2 sources can be related for example to production of biogas in anaerobic digestion plants.

UP-TO-ME targets a ground-breaking change in decentralized Power-to-Methanol production for hard to electrify applications, like marine vessels. The potential of producing renewable methanol, only by utilizing the CO2 content of biogas in Europe is 128 Mt/a. UP-TO-ME concept is based on a hybrid process which combines the capture of CO2 with the synthesis to methanol in a fully autonomous, unmanned plant. The process comprises 3D-printed reactors and column packings designed using highly advanced Computational Fluid Dynamics. The fully automated, self-learning and self-optimizing control system allows production at fluctuating conditions by combining dynamical plant models and Artificial Intelligence. The aim of UP-TO-ME to provide self-optimizing control even for off-grid-operation is very challenging and, to our knowledge, has not yet been achieved anywhere for comparable plants. The ability of a remote plant to adapt itself to varying boundary conditions such as availability of renewable energies (e.g., from weather forecasts) or on the availability of CO2 from a fluctuating source, open unforeseen possibilities for distributed production.

Currently, so-called blue methanol originating from natural gas, is used in limited cases as a marine fuel. However, the quality requirements of a renewable marine methanol fuel, especially considering water content, organic and sulfur impurities originating from P2X production, are not known. UP-TO-ME will assess experimentally the suitability of the produced fuel on a marine type of engine and provide ranges for fuel specifications and max limits for impurities for this to become a sustainable marine fuel.