Food grade methanol is what ends up in food stuffs. Wrigleys chewing gum was the worlds largest user of food grade methanol as a sweetner. Methanol's extremely high cost of manufacturing (due to the increase in price of natural gas feed stock) is why its domestic production is waining. It is accelerating in other countries where natural gas is far cheaper than here. Trinidad is one of the worlds largets methanol producers on the planet. Methanex (a Canadian Company) is the operator of the plant. It has become far cheaper and more economical to ship Methanol than it is to import cheap natural gas via LNG and terminals, due to the lack of support by the U.S. (the not in my back yard syndrome) While Henry Hub prices are lingering around the $7.00 per mcf (1000 cubic feet) in Trinidad, its probably around $1.00-$1.50 per mcf. Eathanol would not be cost effective due to the ammount of processes it takes to make ethanol, then convert it or "reform" it into Hydrogen. This is the vast complication of the fuel cell. The feed stock or source is its only current limitations. Well that and the logistics of the fueling stations. Which from reading some things here that the logistics of that is not as much of an issue.
When I lived in New Zealand, a freind of my Dad's ran the Motonui methanol plant. The government there did a joint venture with Mobil oil to make synthetic gasoline. Take natural gas, convert it to mentanol, then pipe it downstream to another plant that turns it into gasoline. This was back in the late 80's when I lived there. The problem was the plant wasn't economical to run because the financing on the facilities demanded that the price of oil be up around 60 dollars a barrel for crude for the whole thing to make money. They shut it down in 2004. Now that crude is at 60 bucks a barrel, I'm wondering if they're thinking about cranking it back up again.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_gasoline
Gunner
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