World's big energy guys get together to discuss 400 million tons of DME.

[NNadir]

Recently I was asked by an advocate of the "ethanol is magic" school of thinking, to compare my favorite prospect for fuel, DME (dimethyl ether) with the ethanol. The person in question offered, apparently with great seriousness that ethanol now represents 3% of the volume of gasoline nationwide on average. Now, since I understand the history of energy, I am going to note that this represents a huge decrease in the proportion of ethanol since the 1930's, when ethanol represented between 6% and 12% of the US gasoline supply in the midwest:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/kids/history/timelines/ethanol.html

Apparently the person, who actually couldn't remember the name of the fuel I proposed, more or less referring to it as "that stuff" seems to have a very poor conception of energy technology. People who do understand energy however, have an excellent appreciation of what DME is, and are not likely to forget the name of this compound, since it is the subject of vast worldwide interest.

The agenda for a symposium on DME at the beginning of last year included all of the world's big corporate energy companies, the names of many which are appropriately despised at DU. The companies including represented many of the world's bad guys: ExxonMobile, Chevron, Shell, ConocoPhillips...

The Symposium title was: "Mega-methanol: Opening New Markets/DME: Getting to 400M Tons Per Year."

The agenda, listing participants, is here:

http://www.syngasrefiner.com/dme/agenda.asp

Personally I feel ambivalent about the case. On one hand, I know how these companies will make DME: From coal and from natural gas. As a person whose main concern is global climate change, I'm certainly not please by this prospect. Already many coal to DME plants operate on a commercial scale and all use coal or natural gas sources.

On the other hand, I cannot help but be happy about the creation of a DME infrastructure, since by DME is by far the cleanest burning transportation there is, lacking a carbon-carbon bond. I am fully aware that DME can be obtained by clean energy approaches, including nuclear and renewables.

How much energy is 400 million metric tons of DME?

Here is a graph giving the entire renewable energy budget for the United States, including burning garbage and wood wastes as "renewable energy." The energy unit is (conveniently) MTOE, metric tons oil equivalent. We see that as of 2003 the renewable output of the United States was about 100 MTOE, down from a high of around 115 MTOE in the mid 1990's.

http://www.iea.org/Textbase/pamsdb/JRECPIC/Total%20Primary%20Energy%20Supply%20from%

1 MTOE is about 45 billion joules, meaning that the energy value of oil is taken to be about 45 million joules/kg.

http://darwin.nap.edu/books/0309043867/html/848.html

The calorific value of DME is about 29 million joules/kg, or slightly less than ethanol (30 million joules/kg) but more than methanol (23 million joules/kg)

http://www.vs.ag/ida/ohno.pdf

http://www.kayelaby.npl.co.uk/chemistry/3_11/3_11_4.html

(If you are following my calculations, you will need to recognize that the conversion factor from kilocalorie, the unit given the first of the two links immediately above, to joules is multiplication by 4,184.)

Thus 1 MT of DME has about 65% of the energy value of one metric ton of oil. From this we see that the large corporate plans for DME production easily dwarf the entire current renewables budget in the United States, including burning wood, burning garbage, making ethanol, wind power, geothermal power, and solar power combined. Four hundred MMT thus of DME represents about 645 MTOE of oil, or about 6.5 times as much as all the renewable consumption in the United States.

DME need not exclude renewable energy sources however. Indeed it is eminently suited for synthesis from exactly that source. Many automotive companies around the world are extremely interested in DME development. Volvo (owned by Ford) is one. Here is a 293 page report from Sweden on the feasibility of making DME and its precursor methanol from wood:

http://www.nykomb.se/pdf/BLGMF.pdf

As I have noted many times, carbon dioxide is obtainable, of course, from air and from burning biomass, and it is clearly known how to hydrogenate carbon dioxide to get methanol or DME.

Japanese car companies are betting heavily on DME. Here is a graphic from Isuzu showing how they view the fuel mix for automobiles in the future:



According to a report from the French energy company, Total, the major players in the Japanese Electrical turbine manufacturing industry, including Hitachi, Mitsubishi and General Electric have all approved DME for use in their gas fired power plants.

http://www.total.com/static/en/medias/topic1618/dme_8_p_anglais_definitif11.pdf

The Rockefeller family, who got rich in the oil business, are involved in building, to the tune of $100 million dollars of their own money a 677 million dollar DME plant in China with Shandong Juitai Chemical company:

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2005/03/rockefeller_inv.html

The Rockefeller family is taking a $100 million stake (31%) in China’s Shandong Jiutai Chemical Co, and teaming up on the construction of a $677-million (5.6 bln yuan) dimethyl ether (DME) production facility.

DME is a clean-burning, synthetic substitute for diesel. (Earlier post.)

The new project, with an annual capacity of one million metric tons (approximately 20,600 barrels per day), is scheduled to start soon. Jiutai produced 50,000 metric tons of DME last year. An additional 100,000 tons of capacity will be added by April.

Coal-gasification using Chevron texaco technology provides the syngas feedstock for the DME conversion. Given its enormous coal resources, China is keenly interested in coal liquefaction technologies for synthetic fuels.


Demand for DME in China is estimated to reach 5.0–10 mln tons (103–206 thousand barrels per day) within five years.

Thus within 5 years, China plans to dwarf current US ethanol production with DME.

I note that all DME infrastructure, including infrastructure designed to run on coal or natural gas generated DME, can be converted to other synthetic starting materials, specifically any source of hydrogen and either carbon monoxide or dioxide. Thus any DME infrastructure built will be adaptable to conditions that may be and should be instituted in a carbon tax scenario. Hydrogen is conveniently obtained by nuclear or renwable means.

[eppur_se_muova]

1. Kick and bookmark to read later....I'm outta town.

[NNadir]

2. See ya'. Y'all come back real soon now, y'heyah.

[4dsc]

3. and the EROEI is what??

Inasmuch as DME looks good environmently, what is the energy return on energy invested ratio??

Aslo given that coal is another finite resoure, wouldn't the cost go up as the amount of coal usage goes up?? Is this just a short term solution to a long term problem??

[NNadir]

4. First of all, DME is good environmentally only in the case where it is not

made from coal.

If it is made from coal, it is only slightly better from an environmental perspective than any Fischer-Tropsch fuel. In fact, the coal route to DME has exactly the same intermediates, carbon oxides and hydrogen, as FT fuel. The choice of DME over synthetic diesel fuel in this case would only be superior in as much as the use of DME eliminates particulate pollution when it is burned in a diesel engine. However from the perspective of the most serious pollutant - that would be carbon dioxide - it is no better than any other Fischer-Tropsch fuel. (If the source carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide is from biomass however, the case is very different.)

The obsession here and elsewhere about the allegedly "magic" number supposedly associated with EROEI is pretty much nonsensical. This is more magical thinking connected with rote, simplistic, and pat (and thus typically American) thinking.

It happens that the financial and "invested energy" resource varies with location. For instance DME and any other Fischer-Tropsch type product located right next to a strip mine in West Virginia would have a very different value than a plant located on the coast of Southern California. Why? Because the coal has to be shipped to Southern California where it does not actually occur.

The current world thinking for DME is insanely based on the concept of making natural gas an easily shipped fuel or making coal into a fluid fuel that can be conveniently used in portable systems.

As pointed out, DME is the subject of active investigation by energy industrialists and scientists world wide, because it is highly flexible in both places from which it can originate and systems in which it can be used as a fuel. It can be obtained from any of these sources: Fossil fuels including coal, oil and natural gas, nuclear reactors and renewable sources, including biomass, wind power and solar energy. Given this flexibility it is complete nonsense to ask for a pat "EROEI" number. Obviously if one is obtaining one's carbon and oxygen from forest wastes, the number is very different than if one is obtaining it from coal and also different if one is obtaining it from thermochemical nuclear hydrogen and atmospheric carbon dioxide or from electrochemical fuel cells (possibly wind driven) of the type proposed by Nobel Prize winning chemist George Olah. So long as the energy is used cheap and of low environmental impact the matter is rather arbitrary. One chooses the source based on environmental laws in force and economics.

What is needed is international consensus bearing the full force of law that charges external costs as part of the cost of energy. Under such a set of laws, oil, coal, and natural gas would become immediately uneconomic and would be phased out, just as they should be.

With this in mind, I repeat my oft stated case that the role of the modern environmentalist should be to fight tooth and nail against coal. Coal and the other two fossil fuels, oil and natural gas, are environmentally unacceptable. They are pure horrors that threaten the continued existence of higher forms of life on earth. There are plenty of energy options, stabilization wedges as the paper in Science that I recently referenced here called them, that are affordable. Energy is relatively easy to obtain, but obtaining energy in such a way as to prevent global climate change involves the surrender of willful public stupidity. It is the stupidity, not energy, which is the problem.

[4dsc]

5. Actually...

The obsession here and elsewhere about the allegedly "magic" number supposedly associated with EROEI is pretty much nonsensical. This is more magical thinking connected with rote, simplistic, and pat (and thus typically American) thinking.

First of all its not a magical number but rather a number that tell you whether or not you're making a good investment into the product discussed.. And since you cannot provide one seems a little suspect to me as well.. One always needs to consider the EROEI when producing energy and it would be foolish to think otherwise.. WOuld you produce an energy source with an EROEI of less then one?? Of course not because you'd be putting more energy into making the source than you would get out of it..

[NNadir]

6. Um...this is energy storage, not energy creation.

You don't understand the subject at all.

Apparently, but not surprisingly, my comments went over your head.