However, its ventures into new technologies and regions have hit the company hard this year, with Mads Nipper, group president and chief executive of Ørsted announcing a total of 3.9bn DKK of impairments.
The FlagshipONE project would have used renewable electricity to produce hydrogen that could then be combined with CO2 to produce methanol.
The aim was to produce 55,000 tonnes of methanol a year, enough for one large container vessel, making it a large-scale pilot project.
Mr Nipper said the company had been unable to secure long-term contracts to buy its e-methanol at a viable price.
Why not carry on and upgrade it to jet fuel?
Oh!
I suspect this projects business case was based on the Danish energy company selling the fuel to Danish shipping company Maesk. Methanol is one possible choice for marine transport. So probably a business issue not a chemistry one.
I know this may seem childish, but at first glance I thought “How did a mad kid become group president?”.
Mads Nipper
What a brilliant name. Sounds like a psychopathic vasectomy surgeon.
I was talking to some acquaintances the other day who were lauding Norway’s and Iceland’s use of renewable energy, how backwards we are in this country and how the Norskis had this huge sovereign wealth fund.
I had to explain to them that both countries combined have fewer than 6 million inhabitants mostly clustered in a few towns on the coast and that we in the UK do not possess many fjords or volcanoes suitable for hydro or geothermal production.
Except the one under which The Caped Potato lives near Ely of course.
@Ottokring
Laughing our heads off at the name Mads Nipper, and liking him for it too, is British humour through and through.
I think that the key words are “viable price”.
If your feedstock methanol is too expensive there’s not much point in converting it into anything else, because that’ll end up too expensive as well.
If he was creating cheap methanol then people would be lining up to buy it.
His problem is that the subsidies aren’t rigged in his favour, which is how to make a profit selling e-anything. He should start lobbying the European Commission immediately.
Why not carry on and upgrade it to jet fuel?
I think your probable answer there is, like using methanol in car fuels, the combustion characteristics are different so you need a slightly different engine. You can do that with cars because they’ll be used in a particular country or region. But planes are largely by definition international & intercontinental. So you need the same sort of fuel worldwide. Maybe the demand for regional airlines isn’t there. Or regional airlines don’t want to buy restricted use planes.
It seems a crazy way of doing business. Spend a lot of money to build a factory to produce a product. And then try & find someone to sell it to.
If you have cheap enough methanol then fuel cell powered electric planes become viable.
@Noel C
I think the word you needed there is possible not viable.
BiS: Not even sure about the possible, given the deadweight issues, though I haven’t done the sums. It’s possibly not as bad as battery aircraft but that depends on the power/weight ratio of fuel cells capable of the power needed.
Petrol + ethanol has stripped paint from the tank of my garden shredder. Methanol is even more corrosive than ethanol. Not good engine fodder.
“Mr Nipper said the company had been unable to secure long-term contracts to buy its e-methanol at a viable price.“
Or, to be precise, the whole idea makes no sense economically.
Just like all the other green scams, then.
The FlagshipONE project would have used renewable electricity to produce hydrogen that could then be combined with CO2 to produce methanol.
The aim was to produce 55,000 tonnes of methanol a year, enough for one large container vessel, making it a large-scale pilot project.
Mr Nipper said the company had been unable to secure long-term contracts to buy its e-methanol at a viable price
So it’s a lot cheaper just to buy fuel drilled from the ground than it is to build new factories dedicated to producing tiny amounts of fuel via the Heath Robinson process.
Who knew?
Why not carry on and upgrade it to jet fuel?
It didn’t work for the Nazis, why should it work now?
@Steve: you may be confusing the Nazi’s use of Fischer-Tropsch (using syn gas) with the postwar Mobil process (using methanol). I don’t know whether it still exists but there was/is a Mobil plant in NZ.
Why does he want to add carbon to hydrogen? Carbon is a deadly poison, as we are repeatedly told.
@TG
It’s probably possible. But the plane is carrying fuel, the fuel cells* to generate electricity & the electric motors. So it depends on the % mass of the aircraft in that configuration compared with a conventional aircraft configuration. I suspect not good. To achieve the same workload you need either more aircraft or more flights. So viable?
*Important to remember, the fuel cells will mass the same at the end of the fight as at takeoff. Same as a battery a/c. An airbreathing conventional engine a/c loses fuel mass throughout the flight. Flight requires lift of mass requires energy.
PiP – I think the lesson is, we don’t need synthetic fuels, we just need to capture Baku.
Too hot, not enough tea. Even after several readings my brain kept processing that headline as “…methadone”
@jgh: I read it as “menthol”.
CO2 is 0.04% of the atmosphere even now
N2 is 78% of the atmosphere
I seem to be missing something here regarding the availability of a key input – if you’ve got hydrogen and free energy, you should be making fertiliser from that abundant part of the atmos, not turning scarce plant food into methanol.
Bongo
You could make ammonia to use as a fuel!!