6.3. Alternate catalytic CO2hydrogenation techniques
for methanol synthesis
Joo et al. (1999)reported CAMERE (CO2hydrogenation to form
methanol via a reverse WGS reaction) process to convert CO2
into methanol. This process comprised a reverse WGS reaction
and a methanol synthesis reaction. CO2and H2were converted
to CO and H2O by the reverse WGS, and then the gaseous mixture of CO/CO2/H2 was fed into the methanol reactor after
removing water. Several useful papers on the CAMERE process were published during the past decade (Park et al., 2000,
2001; Joo and Jung, 2003).
Low temperature methanol synthesis in a liquid medium
is a candidate technique reported in the literature. According toXu et al. (2009), this technology is expected to produce
methanol more efficiently than the conventional methanol
production processes using Cu/ZnO-based catalysts, due to
the fact that it has several advantages over the conventional
process, i.e., thermodynamically favourable low temperature
operation and efficient removal of the heat of reaction due to
the large heat capacity of a liquid medium. Recently,Liu et al.
(2007) employed a novel low-temperature route in an autoclave for the efficient conversion of CO2into methanol. Using
this process, 25.9% CO2conversion and 72.9% methanol selectivity was achieved at a low temperature of 443 K and pressure
of 5 MPa using alcohol as solvent.