Herein, from ExxonMobil, is explicit statement - which statement is confirmed by our United States Government, as our Government is embodied in the Patent Office - that the Carbon Dioxide in a stream of industrial exhaust gas can be productively reclaimed and recycled for the production of Methanol.
Comment follows excerpts from:
"United States Patent 6,495,609 - Carbon Dioxide Recovery in ... Ethylene Oxide Production
Date: December, 2002
Inventor: Ronald Searle, Texas
Assignee: ExxonMobil, Inc., Houston
Abstract: Disclosed is a method for recovering carbon dioxide from an ethylene oxide production process and using the recovered carbon dioxide as a carbon source for methanol synthesis. More specifically, carbon dioxide recovered from an ethylene oxide production process is used to produce a syngas stream. The syngas stream is then used to produce methanol.
Claims: A method of making methanol, comprising: introducing an ethylene stream into an ethylene oxide reaction unit; forming an ethylene oxide product within the ethylene oxide reaction unit; removing the ethylene oxide product and a carbon dioxide containing vent stream from the ethylene oxide reaction unit; producing a syngas stream from the carbon dioxide vent stream; and producing methanol from the syngas stream.
Summary: This invention provides a method of using carbon dioxide produced in an ethylene oxide reaction unit to produce methanol. Carbon dioxide produced during ethylene oxide production is used to produce syngas which is used to produce methanol.
In one embodiment, the invention provides a method of making methanol. The method comprises obtaining a carbon dioxide stream from an ethylene oxide production process, producing a syngas stream incorporating the carbon dioxide stream, and producing methanol from the syngas stream."
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There seems little need to reproduce the technicalities. If you have followed our posts at all, you know what "syngas" is, and what can be done with it.
But, there is nothing special about the Carbon Dioxide reclaimed "from an ethylene oxide production process" which can then be converted, as herein, into that "methanol ... syngas".
It would be chemically and exactly the same as Carbon Dioxide recovered from the "vent stream" emerging out of a Coal-fired power plant smokestack.
And, it would be chemically and exactly the same as any CO2 that might be pumped back up out of a leaky old West Texas oil well - where it just might, at great expense to the consumers of Coal-based electrical power, and fortuitously for ExxonMobil, have been, by law, sequestered.
Remember: Texas-based ExxonMobil, down in Houston, know how, once they have that Methanol, made, as herein, from industrial exhaust gas Carbon Dioxide, through their "MTG"(r) technology, to convert that Methanol into Gasoline.
Note, too, that, as in earlier of our reports, Coal-use industries are far, far from the only human activitiies that generate useful amounts of by-product CO2.
The implications would seem obvious; and, further explanatory, or inflammatory, comment should be uneeded.