http://dx.doi.org/10.
1595/205651317X695622 Johnson Matthey Technol. Rev., 2017, 61, (3), 172–182
JOHNSON MATTHEY
TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
Methanol Production – A Technical History
A review of the last 100 years of the industrial history of methanol production and
a look into the future of the industry
By Daniel Sheldon
Johnson Matthey, PO Box 1, Belasis Avenue,
Billingham, Cleveland TS23 1LB, UK
Email: daniel.sheldon@matthey.com
Global methanol production in 2016 was around
85 million metric tonnes (1), enough to fill an Olympic-
sized swimming pool every twelve minutes. And if all the
global production capacity were in full use, it would only
take eight minutes. The vast majority of the produced
methanol undergoes at least one further chemical
transformation, more likely two or three before being
turned into a final product. Methanol is one of the first
building blocks in a wide variety of synthetic materials
that make up many modern products and is also used
as a fuel and a fuel additive. This paper looks at the
last 100 years or so of the industrial history of methanol
production.
Introduction
Methanol has been produced and used for millennia,
with the ancient Egyptians using it in the embalming
process – it was part of the mixture of substances
produced in the destructive distillation (pyrolysis) of
wood. However, it was not until 1661 that Robert Boyle
produced pure methanol through further distillation,
and only in 1834 was the elemental composition
determined by Jean-Baptiste Dumas and Eugene
172 © 2017 Johnson Matthey
www.technology.matthey.com
Peligot. At a similar time, commercial operations using
destructive distillation were beginning to operate (2).
There are many parallels between the industrial
production of methanol and ammonia and it was the
early development of the high pressure catalytic
process for the production of ammonia that triggered
investigations into organic compounds: hydrocarbons,
alcohols and so on. At high pressure and temperature,
hydrogen and nitrogen will only form ammonia, however
the story is very different when combining hydrogen
and carbon oxides at high pressure and temperature,
where the list of potential products is lengthy and almost
all processes result in a mixture of products. Through
variations in the process, the catalyst, the conditions,
the equipment or the feedstock, a massive slate of
industrial ingredients suddenly became available and a
race to develop commercial processes ensued.
The First Drops
Early research into methanol production quickly
focused on copper as a prime contender for the basis
of a catalytic process to methanol, with Paul Sabatier
and Jean-Baptiste Senderens (3) discovering in 1905
that copper effectively catalysed the decomposition
of methanol and to a lesser extent its formation. A
lot of the early testing looked at what catalysts could
effectively destroy methanol, assuming they would
be equally as effective under alternative conditions at
forming methanol. Following the start of large scale
ammonia production in Germany during 1913, the
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pace of research picked up and in 1921 Georges Patart
patented the basis of a high pressure catalytic process
that used a variety of materials including copper (along
with nickel, silver or iron) for methanol synthesis (4).
A small experimental plant was later built using this
process in Patart’s native France, near Asnières (5).
The German Effort
The wood-based processes were always very limited
in scale and it was 1923 before production could
be considered ‘industrial’ with a catalytic process
developed by Mathias Pier at Badische Anilin- &
Sodafabrik (BASF), Germany (Figure 1).
The BASF process produced methanol from synthesis
gas (syngas), which at the time was a mixture of
hydrogen and carbon monoxide. The process works by
the following reactions:
CO + 2H2 D CH3OH ΔH = –90.6 kJ (i)
CO2 + 3H2 D CH3OH + H2O ΔH = –49.5 kJ (ii)
CO + H2O D CO2 + H2 ΔH = –41.2 kJ (iii)
Methanol formation (Equations (i) and (ii)) is favoured
by low temperatures and high pressures. All three
equilibrium reactions occur simultaneously, although it
is common to only consider two of the three to simplify
any analysis, as it can be seen that Equations (ii) and
(iii) combined are the same as Equation (i).
The BASF process operated at above 300 atm and
300–400°C, using a zinc chromite (Cr2O3-ZnO) catalyst
developed by Alwin Mittasch (6), about a decade after
Fig. 1. First shipment of synthetic methanol from BASF
Leuna, 1923 (Courtesy of BASF Corporate Archives,
Ludwigshafen/Rhine, Germany)
173 © 2017 Johnson Matthey
his work on the first industrial ammonia synthesis
catalyst. The high pressures benefitted conversion
to methanol and to achieve sufficiently quick reaction
rates, high temperatures also had to be used. Further
increases in temperature would have drastic effects
on the selectivity and equilibrium, so conditions were
selected to be a compromise. Methanol production
began on 26th September 1923 at the Leuna site (7).
Early Catalysts
The subsequent research into the catalyst was
extensive, with the list of possible candidates covering
large swathes of the periodic table, from antimony to
zirconium, bismuth to uranium (itself a popular catalyst
of the time) (5, 8). Given the extensive testing, it is
perhaps unsurprising that in the list can be found many
of the components that make up the modern catalysts
used in methanol plants in the 21st century.
Initially, iron was to be used for methanol production (as
with ammonia production), but this along with nickel was
phased out in successive patent applications until the
requirement for the process to be ‘completely excluding
iron from the reaction’ was included in the mid 1920s (9).
During the early years there was a lot of effort looking
at other combinations of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen.
One major application was Fischer-Tropsch reactions:
the creation of straight chain saturated hydrocarbons,
for example for fuels. This is readily catalysed by
iron at similar conditions to methanol synthesis. With
early iron-containing methanol synthesis catalysts,
it was found that the iron would react with the carbon
monoxide to form iron carbonyl, which decomposes at
high temperatures to iron metal. It was therefore easy
to transform the catalyst into one much more efficient
at making hydrocarbons than methanol; reactions that
are even more exothermic and not equilibrium limited,
hence at risk of thermal runaway. The catalyst is not the
only source of iron in such processes, with the obvious
choice for construction of the early reactor vessels being
steel, which itself contains iron. Many of the early plants
were therefore either lined or made of non-ferrous
metals, such as copper, silver or aluminium (10).
Early Processes
The equilibrium limitations of the methanol formation
reactions (Equations (i)–(iii)), especially under the
early operating conditions, were such that conversion
to methanol in a single pass through a reactor was
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very low. To overcome this, the gas had to be recycled
over the catalyst a number of times. Each time, the gas
is cooled to condense any product methanol and the
consumed reactants are replaced with fresh synthesis
gas. The gas is rarely pure hydrogen and carbon
monoxide, and any non-reacting species, such as
methane or nitrogen, introduced through the fresh gas
supply accumulate in such a loop, so a small fraction
of the gas must be purged, also losing some reactants.
Figure 2 shows the basic components of a methanol
synthesis loop, which are still used today.
The interchanger is a more modern concept, reducing
energy consumption by using the hot gas exiting the
converter to heat the inlet gas. Early patents (11) show
a lot of the aspects of modern methanol production,
including the recycle loop and the use of a guard
bed of additional catalyst or absorbent to remove
“traces of substances deleterious to the reaction”,
early versions tending to be copper based. The loss
of reactants through the purge was also considered
in early processes, with Forrest Reed filing a patent
in 1932 (12) for recycling the purged gas through an
additional reactor in a loop with high concentrations of
non-reacting components, complete with condensation
and separation. This approach is now used to revamp
and add capacity to modern methanol plants.
The general concept spread rapidly and plants could
be found around the world by the end of the 1920s
producing a total of around 42,000 metric tonnes per
Converter
Synthesis gas
Circulator
Purge gas
Interchanger
Catchpot
Methanol Crude cooler
Fig. 2. Basic components of a pressurised methanol
synthesis loop
174 © 2017 Johnson Matthey
year of methanol in new, catalysed, high-pressure
processes (13).
Catalyst Developments
Early on it was recognised that the most effective
catalysts used a combination of copper and another
metal oxide, but the synthesis section and catalyst
remained very similar for about 25 years. Eugeniusz
Błasiak filed a patent in 1947 for a new catalyst
containing copper, zinc and aluminium, manufactured
by co-precipitation (14). The patent claimed a method
for producing a “highly active catalyst for methanol
synthesis” and further laboratory testing over the
following decades proved this.
The biggest impediment to the use of copper catalyst
was the rate of poisoning by sulfur compared to the
zinc chromite catalysts typically used in those plants.
The syngas generation process had moved on from
coal and coke feeds to natural gas reforming, and
it was accepted that sulfur in the feed would poison
the reforming catalyst and reduce the activity. The
reformers were therefore run at close to atmospheric
pressure to prevent hydrocarbon cracking over the
poisoned catalyst, which would cover the surface in a
layer of carbon and remove all residual activity. Around
this time, work was underway to create an alkalised
reforming catalyst which was protected against carbon
deposition and could therefore run at elevated pressure
(initially 14 atm, but soon after up to 35 atm) (15). A
second development at a similar time gave hydro-
desulfurisation catalysts, which remove sulfur from
the naphtha or natural gas feedstock and preserve the
activity of the reforming catalyst. This gave a process
for supplying high purity syngas at increased pressure.
The cost of compressing syngas is much greater than
the cost of compressing natural gas, so the opportunity
to move compression duty upstream also provided an
energy efficiency benefit to plant designs.
By the 1960s, methanol was being made almost
solely from natural gas and naphtha using low pressure
reforming and high pressure synthesis, with a broad
range of process licensors all offering a very similar
configuration. Substantial gains in process efficiency
had been made since the very early plants, partly due
to the larger scale of the later plants. One technology
that the largest plants of the time could take advantage
of was centrifugal compressors, offering much lower
costs at high gas flow rates compared to the previous
reciprocating machines (16). With these gains
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increasing with equipment size, the drive for bigger and
bigger plants continued.
The British Intervention
In the 1960s, arguably the biggest change to the
industry was introduced by Imperial Chemical Industries
(ICI), UK. This began in 1963 when Phineas Davies
and Frederick Snowdon filed a patent for a methanol
production process operating at 30–120 atm (17).
Using a copper, zinc and chromium catalyst, they had
created a process capable of producing high quantities
of methanol without the need for very high pressures.
The lower pressures meant that fast reaction rates
could be achieved at lower temperatures of 200–300°C,
which reduced the formation of byproducts. This meant
the catalyst was able to achieve a selectivity of greater
than 99.5%, based on organic impurities in the liquid
methanol.
At a similar time, ICI had developed its ‘high pressure’
steam reformer, capable of transforming naphtha
or later, natural gas into syngas. The process was
therefore not just a method of synthesising methanol,
but a complete process from natural gas to methanol:
the Low Pressure Methanol (LPM) process, which
remains the leading route to methanol to this day.
The catalyst was soon revised with a patent application
by John Thomas Gallagher and John Mitchell Kidd
175 © 2017 Johnson Matthey
of ICI in August 1965 (18) to a catalyst containing
the oxides of copper, zinc and another element from
Groups II to IV of the periodic table, with aluminium
being the preferred candidate. This was the catalyst
that ICI installed in its own methanol plant constructed
at the time and forms the basis of the KATALCOJMTM
51-series of catalysts sold around the world by Johnson
Matthey today.
ICI constructed and commissioned the first LPM plant
at its site in Billingham, UK, in 1966 (Figure 3) with a
design capacity of 300 metric tonnes per day (MTPD)
and an expected catalyst lifetime of six months. The
synthesis section operated at only 50 atm (19). Two
years later the catalyst was still operating and the plant
could consistently produce 400 MTPD. This increased
to 550 MTPD with the second catalyst charge and
some further plant upgrades. The converter had
71 m3 of catalyst, with three cold shots of gas injected
partway down the bed to cool the reacting gas. The
plant operated until 1985.
At the lower pressure of the new process, the
circulating gas volumes were greater and therefore
centrifugal compressors were advantageous at lower
plant capacities (16). Much more efficient plants were
then available without needing to construct a large-
scale facility.
ICI by this time had a long history of methanol
production, stretching back to 1929 with its first high
Fig. 3. ICI (low pressure) methanol
1 plant at Billingham
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pressure plant operated under licence from IG Farben
(then owners of BASF). Following a few years of
successful operation of the Billingham plant, ICI licensed
the technology and in 1970 a 130 MTPD plant was
commissioned for Chang Chun Petrochemical Co Ltd
in Taiwan (20). In spite of a challenging two weeks of
commissioning, with “torrential rain, a typhoon and an
earthquake”, this plant was to be the first of many and
later that year a 1000 MTPD plant was commissioned
for Monsanto at Texas City, Texas, USA. Only a single
high pressure synthesis plant was built after 1966 (21).
Methanol Converters
The most distinguishing feature of most methanol
plants (or licensors) is the type of converter used for
methanol synthesis. Broadly the converters can be
divided into two categories based on how they remove
the heat of reaction to maximise conversion:
i. multiple adiabatic catalyst beds with external
cooling of the gas
ii. internal cooling within one or more catalyst beds.
Externally cooled converters come in a variety of
configurations: quench converters inject cold, unreacted
gas after each adiabatic bed to reduce the temperature,
whereas series adiabatic converters use heat
exchangers between the catalyst beds. Both externally
and internally cooled types were used in the early low
pressure plants, with the quench converters offered by
ICI benefitting from the simple vessel design minimising
cost. The early versions employed a single catalyst
bed with gas injection points at multiple locations down
the vessel. These designs were susceptible to large
temperature distributions developing and propagating
down the vessel. A subsequent improvement on the
design therefore collected the gas, mixed it with the
incoming quench gas and distributed it across the next
bed. This prevented temperature variations propagating
from bed to bed. Many reactors of this design operate
around the world today as ARC reactors, a joint ICI and
Casale SA, Switzerland, design from the early 1990s.
Figure 4 shows the reaction pathway of a quench
converter, with successive additions of cold gas taking
it back away from the equilibrium line to maximise
conversion.
Series adiabatic converters are more efficient users
of catalyst as, without the need for quench gas that
bypasses the early beds, all the gas passes over all
the catalyst and the temperature control for each bed
is truly independent. Additional heat exchangers in
176 © 2017 Johnson Matthey
Equilibrium line
Methanol, %
Reaction path
Low High
Temperature
Fig. 4. Reaction path in a quench converter
the loop contribute to higher capital costs and series
adiabatic beds never really found favour in the industry.
Internally cooled reactors began with Lurgi GmbH,
Germany, shortly after the first LPM plant from ICI. The
Lurgi reactor was one that had already been used for
many years in Fischer-Tropsch synthesis and consisted
of catalyst-filled vertical tubes surrounded by a shell of
boiling water, with the reaction heat transferred into the
shell to generate steam to be used elsewhere in the
process. A steam drum local to the converter provides a
constant supply of water at boiling temperature through
natural circulation. This design achieved a more even
temperature distribution and lower peak temperature.
Whilst the converter was more complicated than the
ICI design, and therefore more expensive, the steam it
generated at about 250ºC could be used elsewhere for
an efficiency benefit or even exported. The design also
required a lower catalyst volume. Figure 5 shows the
reaction pathway in such a converter, following more
closely the temperature for maximum reaction rate
compared to quench converters. Many variations exist
on this theme today, some with the catalyst and boiling
water reversed, such as in the Variobar of Linde AG,
Germany, which uses helical tubes in an axial catalyst
bed to achieve pseudo-cross flow.
Other internally cooled converters use process gas on
the cooling side, including ICI’s subsequent tube cooled
converter, in which cold gas rises inside empty vertical
tubes, absorbing heat from the surrounding catalyst
bed before turning over at the top of the converter and
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point of maximum reaction rate, a balance of the kinetic

limitations of low temperature and the thermodynamic
(equilibrium) limitations of high temperature.

Capacity Expansion
Equilibrium line
The basic formula was now set and so the plants could
Methanol, %

grow in size and scale. By the early 1970s the plants

Reaction path
Low High
Temperature
Fig. 5. Reaction path in a water cooled converter
flowing back down through the catalyst bed. The large
amount of heat generated by the synthesis reactions
requires a high flow rate on the cooling side, which for
gas-based cooling is typically only available within the
synthesis loop, with different designs utilising gas from
different parts of the loop.
Most modern converters use internal cooling, either
with circulating gas or by raising steam, which broadly
allows the temperature in the catalyst bed to track the
had gone from the 150 MTPD of the early low pressure
plants to 1500 MTPD. The second plant ICI built at
Billingham in 1972 had a design capacity of 1100 MTPD
and used 110 m3 of catalyst (22) operating at 100 atm.
This second plant operated through to 2001 and struck
a better balance of operating pressure and equilibrium,
with the vast majority of plants since having been
designed for 80–100 atm. This heralded the start of the
first golden age of methanol expansion in the early part
of the 1970s as people recognised the benefits of the
new LPM process. Figure 6 shows the approximate
capacity added each year using LPM technology, with
a notable peak in the 1970s and further peaks in the
1980s and around 2010 that will be explored in the
second half of this history.
By the early 1980s all new plants were being
constructed using low-pressure technology and almost
all of the high-pressure plants had been converted to
low pressure (23). Interestingly the pyrolysis of wood
had not completely ceased as the use of ‘synthetic’
methanol had not yet been accepted as an alcohol
denaturant in some countries. British Law to this day

50
Added capacity, tonnes per day × 103

40

30

20

10

0
1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020
Year

Fig. 6. Added global methanol capacity by year

177 © 2017 Johnson Matthey

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(24) is based on the use of ‘wood naphtha’ to denature
pure ethanol, a process whereby it is made unsuitable
for human consumption and therefore exempt from
beverage sales taxes. Wood naphtha is the mixture
of substances derived from pyrolysis, primarily methyl
alcohol (methanol).
The 1980s saw the impact of the second oil crisis
that followed the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and the
Iran-Iraq war that started soon after. The increased oil
price meant that oil producing nations had significantly
increased revenues and this allowed them to increase
petrochemical production, including methanol. Thus
began the second golden age of methanol expansion.
But the oil crisis also prompted countries to start looking
at how they could become less reliant on imported oil
and to start looking at production of synthetic fuels.
Synthetic Fuels
The expansion of methanol is driven by demand for
derivatives and a recurring theme throughout the
history is its potential use as an intermediate in the
production of synthetic automobile fuel. Whilst interest
has peaked on a number of occasions, typically when
a nation struggles with domestic supply, there have
been few plants actually constructed. One example
is the two methanol plants in Motunui, New Zealand,
which were constructed for synthetic fuel production in
1985, using the Mobil licensed methanol to gasoline
(MTG) process (25). Both plants now solely produce
methanol and the MTG equipment has been removed.
Whilst the production of a direct petrol replacement
has never found lasting favour, many plants today are
being constructed to feed methanol to olefins (MTO)
processes to produce olefins from coal instead of
from naphtha or ethane, and an increasing amount of
methanol is blended into gasoline supplies around the
world to meet legislative requirements.
Autothermal Reforming and Alternative
Reforming
For a typical natural gas to methanol plant using steam
reforming technology, roughly a half of the capital cost
is in the steam reformer and it also accounts for a large
part of the footprint. Available technology limited the
maximum economic size of a single reformer and a
new technology was therefore required to allow plant
capacities to expand beyond about 2500 MTPD (26).
This limit was first identified in the early 1970s when
178 © 2017 Johnson Matthey
methanol was being considered as a way to move
energy around in the face of global imbalance. To
produce sufficient quantities of methanol to achieve
this, production capacity would need to increase
rapidly with plants of up to 5000 MTPD, which would
have required 2000 tube steam reformers. The largest
constructed at that time had only 600 (27).
The gap was ultimately filled with autothermal
reforming; the controlled introduction of oxygen
into (partially) reformed gas to combust some of the
hydrogen, providing the heat for further reforming
reactions across another bed of catalyst. As the heat is
produced and retained within the process, a lot of the
equipment associated with reformers is not needed,
although a supply of oxygen is required, typically from
an air separation unit. The technology is deployed in
various configurations:
• parallel reforming – a steam reformer and
autothermal reformer (ATR) are used in parallel
• combined reforming – the steam reformer is
partially bypassed and the bypass and reformed
gas are combined and fed to the ATR to complete
the reforming process.
A further development by ICI in the 1980s was to
completely remove the traditional steam reformer in the
Leading Concept Methanol (LCM) process. Rather than
burning fuel gas to provide the heat for the reforming
reactions, the hot, autothermally reformed gas was
used to heat the catalyst tubes in a gas heated reformer
(GHR). The feed gas first passes through the catalyst
in the GHR, then the ATR and finally the heating side
of the GHR to provide the heat for the initial reaction.
It is possible to take these concepts even further and
some plants have only an ATR. Autothermal Reforming
is susceptible to soot formation if significant quantities
of higher hydrocarbons are present and so a simple
adiabatic pre-reformer is required to de-rich the natural
gas. This arrangement produces a gas very rich in
carbon oxides and is therefore most effective where a
source of additional hydrogen is present to balance the
stoichiometry of the gas.
Typically, combined reforming gives a plant with a
reasonably sized steam reformer, a low level of methane
in the syngas and a stoichiometrically balanced syngas
for methanol formation.
Modern Catalysts
The speed of catalyst development had greatly
increased since the mid 1970s when testing equipment
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began to be automated, greatly increasing the amount
of test work that could be conducted. This led to
a number of step changes in the performance of
methanol synthesis catalysts, although the base recipe
of copper with a combination of zinc and aluminium or
chromium oxides remained very similar. One such step
change was in the early 1990s, with a new generation
of catalysts being introduced, just as capacities were
ramping up and plant operators were looking to uprate
their original low pressure plants (28). ICI introduced
a new, more active catalyst using a four-component
system, adding magnesium to the existing copper, zinc
and aluminium (Figure 7).
Modern catalysts are expected to last at least three
years and typically between four and six years is
achieved, although six to eight years is not uncommon.
The catalysts are highly selective towards methanol
synthesis and the effects of some of the early catalyst
candidates (iron and nickel) are better appreciated,
especially their role in the formation of paraffinic
hydrocarbons, and these are now seen as catalyst
poisons. Despite the selectivity of modern catalysts
being in excess of 99.5%, there is still a need to
remove various impurities from the condensed product
methanol to achieve either chemical or fuel sales
grades. Generally, this is achieved at low pressure
with one, two or three distillation columns in series.
Dissolved gases are removed first, along with low
boiling point byproducts and then the difficult methanol-
ethanol separation must be conducted, along with
water removal. The water can be reused in the steam
system, the light ends as fuel and the ethanol (actually
a mixture of many heavier organic compounds) can be
Fig. 7. An example of the latest generation of methanol
synthesis catalysts; Johnson Matthey KATALCOJMTM 51-9S
179 © 2017 Johnson Matthey
added back into the process before the reformer, to be
reformed and reused.
In 2004, the long destined capacity of 5000 MTPD
was achieved when the Atlas plant was commissioned
in Trinidad, only for it to be overtaken the following
year by M5000, also in Trinidad, producing up to
5400 MTPD. This latter plant achieved its capacity with
only a steam reformer containing less than 1000 tubes,
showing the simultaneous improvements in reforming
catalyst and technology. Figure 8 shows the twin
synthesis converters on M5000.
China – The Coal Story
A lot of the growth in the methanol industry through the
early 21st century (the third golden age of methanol
expansion) came from China and its booming economy.
China’s petrochemical industry had been heavily
dependent on imported crude oil, although China
had plentiful supplies of cheap coal. China began to
embrace new technologies for converting their coal
into other chemicals and one key building block in that
process was methanol. Rapidly increasing demand
for a wide range of methanol derivatives, particularly
olefins via the MTO process, has required a continuous
supply of new methanol plants using coal gasification
to provide the syngas for methanol synthesis.
To take advantage of the economies of scale, and
in some cases to fit in with the economic size of a
downstream MTO plant, the demand for higher and
higher capacity synthesis loops has grown. With the
methanol plants typically near to the coal in remote
locations, the main process equipment must be
Fig. 8. 5000 MTPD of methanol synthesis capacity at
M5000, Trinidad
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transported to the sites by rail, where bridges in particular
limit the maximum diameter and the infrastructure can
limit the maximum weight. Whilst vessels can be made
taller and taller, for catalyst beds this will soon result in
very high pressure drops. For synthesis loops above
about 3000 MTPD the catalyst requirement is too great
to use a single vessel and multiple converters in a single
loop are required. Initially and at modest capacities,
two identical parallel converters were sufficient. As
capacities continued to increase, so did the complexity,
with multiple converters of different types used within
single loops to reduce the capital cost of the loop
equipment, as shown in Figure 9 with the Johnson
Matthey Combi Loop. Other loops were designed using
the Johnson Matthey Series Loop where product is
recovered between converters to reset the equilibrium
and increase production. The largest plants in operation
by 2010 would typically have two or more converters
to make up to 5500 MTPD of methanol. To minimise
pressure drop and therefore compression duty in large
synthesis loops, larger water cooled reactors are now
available in radial flow configurations.
The second aspect of the growth in China is the coal
to methanol story, which uses gasification technologies
to convert coal and steam at very high temperature to
syngas. Modern purification systems now allow the
syngas to be substantially cleaned of sulfur and other
impurities and a very pure gas is fed to the synthesis
loop, unlike the systems from the 1920s and 1930s.
Typically, coal-fed plants give a much more carbon
monoxide-rich syngas compared to steam reforming of
natural gas, the more exothermic route to methanol and
so the ability to remove heat is even more important.
Energy and Environmental Efficiency
Since the introduction of the low pressure process,
the focus turned to energy efficiency, especially during
increasing energy prices in the 1970s and 1980s.
Table I shows the progression of efficiency over these
years by ICI through successive improvements to the
integration of the whole plant.
With the ever increasing focus on environmental
performance, there are a number of designs and new
plants in recent years which aim to set new standards
for efficiency or emissions. One particular plant is
Carbon Recycling International’s (CRI) George Olah
Plant in Iceland, fully commissioned in 2012. Using
electricity from the fully renewable Icelandic grid,
it electrolyses water to provide hydrogen, which is

Axial steam- Steam

raising converter

Boiler feed water

Tube cooled
converter Steam drum

Circulator

Purge
Interchanger

Feed Condenser
Separator
Crude
methanol

Fig. 9. Modern synthesis loop – Johnson Matthey Combi Loop

180 © 2017 Johnson Matthey

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Table I Improvements in Feed and Fuel Consumption (29)
Flow sheet Year
HP Pre-1966
LP – 50 atm 1966
LP – 100 atm 1972
BFW heating 1973
Optimisation 1975
Quench pre-heating 1977
Saturator 1978
Tube cooled converter 1983
LCM 1989
combined with carbon dioxide recovered from a local
geothermal power station (30).
Other new plants are considering the emissions
benefits of avoiding a steam reformer and using
the GHR technology to set new standards for low
emission natural gas-based plants. The plans for
Northwest Innovation Works (NWIW), USA, use the
technology and will be among the largest plants in the
world (31).
The Future
With the imminent start-up of the 7000 MTPD plant of
Kaveh in Iran (32), the scale of plants continues to grow.
Methanol demand has grown steadily for many years
fuelled by economic growth in major countries around
the world, a trend which is likely to continue. Many of
the current plant licensors and designers have flow
sheets capable of scaling up to 10,000 MTPD, but after
a number of purported projects, it remains to be seen if
the economy of scale is ready to be stretched that far
or if the security of multiple trains once again wins out.
At least for now, the production of methanol via the
LPM process remains dominant, despite research
interest into other themodynamically attractive routes.
Recent examples based on the partial oxidation of
methane to methanol include the work of Zhijun Zuo
et al. (33) and Patrick Tomkins et al. (34). Whilst work
such as this could open up a new, low temperature
route to methanol, no such new routes have so far left
the laboratory.
KATALCOTM is a trademark of the Johnson Matthey
group of companies.
181 © 2017 Johnson Matthey
Consumption,
GJ MT–1
42
36
36
32.6
32.2
31.4
30.1
29.3
28.6
References
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The Author
Daniel Sheldon is a Senior Process Engineer at Johnson Matthey, Chilton, UK. He obtained
his MEng (Hons) in chemical engineering from the University of Manchester, UK. He joined
Johnson Matthey on the graduate training scheme in 2011 and has spent time in catalyst
manufacturing and technology development for the ammonia and methanol industries.
Currently he provides technical support to Key Methanol Customers. He is a Chartered
Member of the Institute of Chemical Engineers (IChemE).

182 © 2017 Johnson Matthey