Methanol

[kato13]

Didn't want to hijack the VEESS thread but this was going to be my response to the mention of methanol.

(might be a re-post to older forum members)

One of the biggest realism misses that the T2k rules has is the use of methanol. I know it might be a necessary addition to allow for game mobility but it is not realistic.

Methanol is not produced in any significant amount by any natural biological organism like ethanol is. Biological organisms can produce methane and formaldehyde, which need to be chemically oxidized or reduced (respectively) to produce methanol. Not easy to do in the field.

Until the 1930s methanol was primarily produced as a by product from the destructive distillation of wood. Did you ever do an experiment in school where you burned wooden sticks inside a glass tube and measured the output. That is similar to the destructive distillation of wood.

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

Given that gives you about 20 Liters per ton processed you can see that methanol is not an efficient option.

Methanol currently comes primarily from Petroleum refining so in the T2k world the prospects for any large scale methanol production looks bleak as you need 25 cubic feet of natural gas to make one liter of methanol.

There is a new, more efficient, high heat and pressure method of methanol production, but again it is not something that could be done in the field. It can actually produce 650 liters per ton of biomass but it would require a ton of energy (as it requires total gasification) and a small refinery sized facility.

The T2K suggestion of a simple farmer making methanol from wood or agricultural waste using the same still that makes ethanol does not match reality.

[Grimace]

Well that's an interesting tidbit of information. Thanks for sharing that! I'd never done enough research into the subject to ever pay that much attention to it.

[kato13]

My morrow game does not have vehicle sized fusion plants to my teams could benefit from being able to make fuel (in addition to using fusion to charge batteries). I looked at a ton of science behind making alcohol and biodiesel. You actually need pure alcohol to make biodiesel so that became a focus. Methanol is actually the most expensive part of making biodiesel. And making ethanol 100% pure is very difficult without the right equipment (beyond a standard still)

Hopefully I will have a full organic fuel generation system spec-ed out sometime in the year or so. It will be VERY different from the standard T2k rules.

[kalos72]

Damn. So is it ok if I plead "ignorance" here? Hehe...this realism sucks for the game. :P

But seriously cool of you to educate us with the information though. I would have kept thinking of wood as a feasible fuel source.

[kato13]

I believed the methanol manufacturing stuff until I was researching something unrelated and unraveled it. I guess GDW heard "wood alcohol" and took it literally.

Your group of 100,000 should be able to make ethanol from wood. I just wont be as easy as the book has methanol being produced. If you can manufacture sulfuric acid for pre-processing the wood, you should be able to do it. Or you can say someone genetically engineered a cellulose processing yeast before or during the early stages of the war (which is something they are working on now).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulosic_ethanol has more information than I can type here.

Unfortunately I do not have realistic production numbers for an improvised manufacturing facilities yet.

[kato13]

Resurrection

Originally Posted by castlebravo92

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

[Vespers War]

Approaching it from the distiller's perspective instead of the "wood alcohol" perspective, it's possible to produce to some extent, but methanol's still probably somewhat difficult. Depending on the strain of yeast and pectin levels in the wort, up to 10% of the product of fermentation can be methanol instead of ethanol. Given that's with brewers/distillers trying to minimize methanol production because it's undesirable for human consumption, that could probably be increased by focusing on using high-pectin raw material, like the skins of citrus fruits. I wouldn't be surprised if a "35 liter" system optimized for producing methanol could turn out ~10 liters of methanol and ~25 liters of ethanol by focusing on high-pectin inputs and yeasts that preferentially hydrolyze the pectin to methanol.

[kato13]

Interesting. I could see the Methanol being used to create biodiesel as it is easier to take Methanol to 100% purity than ethanol. And 100% pure alcohol, is often the limiting factor in bioD production. Might change the calculus in areas rife with citrus.

[.45cultist]

Just as guano was fought over for nitrates, fighting over fast food grease dumpsters for biodiesel could be a scenario, or racing to scavenge these in the ruins of a big city.