Thread: Methanol
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Old 01-05-2023, 09:38 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by castlebravo92 View Post
Destructive distillation is the low-tech way to go with methanol production from wood. It's not horribly efficient, but it works, it's fast, and doesn't require yeast and fermentation for a couple of weeks, which is one of the fatal flaws with ethanol production. Likely doable for a character party on the move.

Another way apparently is to heat dry wood to generate wood gas, and use a catalytic process to generate methanol from the wood gas. Not very low tech, and probably not appropriate for a character party on the run.

On a the complex industrialization side of the fence, methanol to gasoline is a thing, and as I posted before, would be easier to get up and running than converting a bunch of 1996 manufactured cars to running on ethanol or methanol. Production wouldn't be enough to get us back to an urban commuter society, but might be enough for the military to keep some aircraft up in the area, generators running for critical activities, and some vehicles running, and given a large cantonment or organized area, accumulate reserves sufficient for things like the Summer 2000 offensive, except using gas instead of alcohol.
Key points.
Destructive Distillation of wood produces the following:

Yield per ton (1 000 kg) of air dry wood
Acetic acid 50 kg
Methanol 16 kg
Acetone and methyl acetone 8 kg
Soluble tars 190 kg
Insoluble tars 50 kg

No where near the numbers the game presents.

As far as mobile ethanol production, I think I came up with a medium still for the Morrow Project which was 196kg which could product 35 liters of ethanol daily (medium still stats but they have 2000k). It included 8 55 gal drums and heating and distillation equipment. You would need to have a drum for each day of the process to hit that number.

I did also think about biodiesel with these two kits
https://games.juhlin.com/equipment/k...ml?parent=1907
https://games.juhlin.com/equipment/k...tml?parent=364


Another methanol thread. (Which also moves into woodgas)
https://forum.juhlin.com/showthread.php?t=4320

Last edited by kato13; 01-05-2023 at 10:04 AM.
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