Energy expert Liu Ke: Methanol may be the best hydrogen storage and transportation carrier

On July 16, the national carbon market officially opened for trading.

Just a day before, Liu Ke, a well-known energy expert, a foreign academician of the Australian National Academy of Engineering, and the dean of the School of Innovation and Entrepreneurship of Southern University of Science and Technology, visited the lecture hall of the academician of science and technology innovation and made a speech on "carbon neutrality misunderstandings and their realistic paths". This event was jointly sponsored by Shenzhen Innovation and Development Research Institute, BoYan Education, Shenzhen Enterprise Federation, Tongxin Club and so on.

Liu Ke developed hydrogen fuel cells in the United States more than a decade ago, returned to China before the chief scientist of GE Global R&D Center, served in famous multinational companies such as UTC, and served as the vice president of Topsoe, an internationally renowned catalyst company headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark. After returning to China, Liu Ke successively served as deputy director and chief technology officer of Beijing Low Carbon and Clean Energy Research Institute, vice president of Shenhua Research Institute, and now works at Southern University of Science and Technology.

Liu Ke pointed out that there were electric vehicles more than 100 years ago, but why did they not beat fuel vehicles? On the one hand, the problem of energy density and infrastructure, the energy density of liquid fuel is high, liquid energy can be transported on land through pipelines, and the sea can be transported across the sea very cheaply, and human beings have built liquid fuel filling facilities all over the world; on the other hand, the problem of mass production costs and pollution, the heavy metals used in batteries (nickel, cobalt, lead, cadmium, etc.) are easy to cause ecological pollution, and battery recovery technology needs to be further developed.

Liu Ke believes that hydrogen energy has obvious advantages, high power generation efficiency, can reduce dependence on oil, discharge water vapor, and the cost of fuel cells can be reduced after large-scale mass production.

However, at the same time, hydrogen energy has problems such as high cost of hydrogen storage and transportation, large safety hazards, and high infrastructure investment. Why have hydrogen vehicles not yet been industrialized? Liu Ke pointed out that the most fundamental reason is that hydrogen is not suitable for the public as an energy carrier that the public and I share. Although it is easy to produce hydrogen, it is difficult to store and transport hydrogen.

He went on to propose that methanol is a very good liquid hydrogen storage and hydrogen transportation carrier. Methanol can be prepared from coal and natural gas. China now has the highest methanol production capacity in the world, about 80 million tons, which is close to 1/4 of gasoline in terms of tonnage. In addition, the shale gas revolution allowed the world to discover natural gas that could not be used for more than 100 years, which meant that there would be more than 100 years of methanol. In the future, methanol can also be made from solar energy, so that the methanol produced is completely green methanol.

At present, methanol filling stations have been successfully demonstrated in many provinces and cities across the country, and existing gas stations can be completed through simple transformation, storage and transportation are basically mature; the storage and transportation of alcohol aqueous solutions is equivalent to the storage and transportation of 64wt% of alcohol, and related technologies are more mature; at the same time, underground parking lots can also build methanol hydrogen power generation systems by themselves, without grid expansion, you can generate electricity in real time and supply charging pile power.

For the storage and transportation of hydrogen, Li Can, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a researcher at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, used carbon dioxide hydrogenation to produce methanol for storage. In 2018, the "Academician Expert Workstation of Lanzhou New District Petrochemical Industry Investment Co., Ltd." jointly established by Li Can's team and Lanzhou New District Shitou Group landed in Lanzhou New District, and in January 2020, the world's first large-scale liquid solar fuel synthesis project was successfully commissioned at one time. The project uses 10MW of photovoltaic electrolysis of water to produce hydrogen, green hydrogen and carbon dioxide collected from chemical companies to synthesize methanol.

Liu Ke believes that the use of renewable energy to produce methanol, and then do distributed power generation, can use methanol hydrogen energy distributed energy to replace all the use of diesel engine scenarios, and photovoltaic, wind energy and other unstable renewable energy to form a multi-energy complementary.

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