Tata Steel to set up a pilot plant for methanol.

Tata Steel is putting up a 10 tonnes-per-day pilot plant at its Kalinganagar plant in Odisha to produce methanol from blast furnace flue gases. If successful, this has the potential to open an avenue for substantial production of methanol in India.

The objective of the project is to test how the carbon dioxide from the blast furnace in steel mills could be combined with hydrogen from electrolysers to make methanol.

“We are very bullish on methanol, we think it will be the next big thing, much bigger than bioethanol,” said Atanu Mukherjee, CEO, Dastur Energy, part of the MN Dastur group. Dastur Energy specialises in carbon technologies, especially in carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS); and has just won a $7.5-million (₹60-crore) order from the US Department of Energy for a carbon capture project in Texas. The company is involved with the Tata Steel pilot methanol plant.

Explaining the rationale behind the project, Mukherjee told businessline that while the methanol plant would not use up large quantities of carbon dioxide coming out of the chimneys of power and steel plants, ushering of a methanol economy would do India a world of good.

Mukherjee said it is possible to produce hydrogen today for $1.5 a kg if produced from the coal gasification route; methanol produced from such hydrogen could be produced at $450 a tonne. (This works out to ₹30 a litre, compared with the government-fixed price of ₹65.60 a litre for bioethanol.) It is possible to produce hydrogen for a dollar a kg through the coal gasification process, he said.

Methanol can be produced at ₹25 a litre, he said, adding that the internal combustion engines currently in use can take 15-25 per cent methanol blend in petrol and diesel, without requiring any modification.

HBL