Process for the production of methanol

There’s a lot of information on the forum; go and look for it yourself

Development of methanol production processes: In 1923, the German company BASF was the first to achieve industrial-scale production of methanol using syngas under high pressure. Until 1965, this high-pressure process was the only method for synthesizing methanol. In 1966, the British company ICI developed the low-pressure process, and later developed the medium-pressure process. In 1971, the German company Lurgi developed low-pressure processes suitable for using natural gas and residue as raw materials. Due to the obvious advantages of the low-pressure process over the high-pressure process in terms of energy consumption, plant construction, and the production capacity of a single reactor series, most new plants abroad have adopted the low-pressure process since the mid-1970s. The typical methanol synthesis processes in the world mainly include the ICI process, the Lurgi process, and the Mitsubishi Gas Chemical Company (MCC) process. Currently, new foreign processes for liquid-phase methanol synthesis offer significant advantages such as low investment costs, high thermal efficiency, and low production expenses. In particular, the LPMEOHTM process, which uses slurry reactors, is well-suited for feed gases with a low H2/(CO+CO2) ratio produced by modern fluidized-bed gasifiers, and it can compete with natural gas as a raw material in terms of cost. 　　Methanol production in our country began in 1957; in the 1950s, facilities for producing methanol from coal or coke were established in places such as Jilin, Lanzhou, and Taiyuan. A number of small and medium-sized plants were built in the 1960s, and a co-production process for methanol was developed based on the ammonia synthesis industry. In the 1970s, the Sichuan Vinylon Plant introduced a 95 kt/a low-pressure process unit that used acetylene off-gases as raw material, based on British ICI technology. In December 1995, the 200 kt/a methanol production plant, jointly designed by the Eighth Design Institute of the Ministry of Chemical Industry and the Shanghai Chemical Engineering Design Institute, was successfully put into operation at Shanghai Pacific Chemical Company, marking a new step forward in China’s methanol production technology toward larger scale and greater domestic production. Currently, several methanol production plants in China with an annual capacity of 500,000 tons each are under construction or already in operation. The largest plant currently in use is the Sinopec Chemicals plant in Dongfang City, Hainan, with an annual capacity of 600,000 tons; it uses natural gas as raw material and features Lurgi low-pressure synthesis towers. Currently, in China, except for some polyol production facilities, low-pressure synthesis processes are used.

There are options using coal as a raw material, as well as natural gas and coke oven gas; please determine the direction you want to pursue first.