Methanol

"Wood alcohol" or methanol is another alternative fuel and has similar chemical properties to ethanol. Methanol is now predominantly produced from natural gas feedstocks after the 1960s advancements in technology and processes made wood a less economical pathway compared to methanol from coal and natural gas utilization. A promising economical pathway for wood would require gasification of a woody feedstock and producing a syngas that would then be processed into methanol (Zerbe 2006).  There are 10 operating methanol plants in the United States in 2006, employing 10,000 direct and indirect jobs, which produce 4.9 billion liters of the domestically demanded 10.6 billion liters. The remainder of the demand is met from imports from Chile, Venezuela, and Canada (MI 2006).

Methanol can be found in plastics and paints and is an ideal hydrogen carrier fuel for fuel cell technologies, but since it has a lower fuel density than ethanol, it has fallen out of favor as a focus of the alternative fuel markets (Zerbe 2006). Methanol is best known today as the official racing fuel used by the Indianapolis 500 since 1965.  SVZ Schwarze Pumpe, in Spreewitz Germany operates a facility that utilizes solid and liquid wastes to produce methanol that is utilized as MTBE for fuel oxygenation in gasoline. In the United States, the Methanol Institute is the leading promoter of this alternative fuel source.