Demonstration of advanced methanol synthesis technology

The project comprises two parts: 1) To demonstrate that Topsoe's new methanol reactor (CONRAD) works as expected at industrial conditions (syngas from fossil fuel as well as syngnas from biomass); 2) To investigate how this novel reactor concept is best used for methanol plants of comparatively small sizes - i.e. a plant scale corresponding to around 50-500 MTPD methanol as such would be a reasonable size for a plant based on biomass or a waste/side stream from a larger facility.

The main activities of the project are operation of a CONRAD reactor for a period of 8 months and calculation of the production cost (CAPEX + OPEX) for two potentially interesting green scenarios: 1) Production of methanol from syngas produced by biomass gasification; 2) Production of methanol from syngas produced by steam reformaing of associated gas from an oil field.

As of today, the CONRAD reactor has been taken into operation in a pilot plant i Piteå, Sweden, and operation parameters are currently being tuned. If the results of the tests and the economic assessments, that we will make in parallel with the tests, are encouring, we indtend to present the technology at the World Methanol Conference later this year