Maersk wishes to build a methanol production plant in Galicia, the production will be used to fuel some of their methanol powered vessels.
I didn't find the full plan, but it should already be active by 2025.
They wish to produce a huge amount of methanol: 2 milion tonnes.
The production method is however very strange: they wish to synthesize green hydrogen and then use that to produce methanol by the reduction of carbon dioxide, this is the standard production method, but it generally works out because hydrogen produced from carbon is quite cheap, on the other hand green hydrogen is quite more expensive.
Wouldn't it be better to produce methanol through biosynthesis?
Sure, you'd need a lot of feedstock but at least you wouldn't need to install several Eolic parks all over the place to generate the required electricity.
Moreover, in A Coruña a plant producing biomethanol through this technology already exists, and they produce a lot: almost 200 million liters per year, and that plant also PRODUCES electricity.
The main problem is that they use a first generation feedstock, which is quite despicable and that probably the methanol produced is not pure enough to be used in those ships.
Wouldn't it be better to expand the current production plant, maybe by innovating the process to use less important feedstocks and if required open a methanol refinery rather than: placing down a bunch of Eolic parks, build a plant to produce hydrogen and build another plant to produce methanol?
I don't know, surely they did their calculations, but without having a written plan one cannot do anything but wonder.
