Tiny Engines Forge Methanol Fuel for Giant Cargo Ships

Massive cargo ships that run on green methanol are now sailing scheduled routes, and ports and suppliers are organizing the infrastructure to fuel them.

In July, the world’s largest methanol dual-fuel container cargo ship, the 400-meter-long OOCL Wisdom, completed its first green methanol fueling (or “bunkering”) at China’s Qingdao Port. Days later, Dutch terminal operator VTTI completed its first large-scale green methanol bunkering load at its facility in Dalian, China. On 11 July, 20 organizations spanning shipping, ports, energy, and equipment manufacturing launched a Methanol Fuel Shipping Supply Chain Innovation Alliance to coordinate a national bunkering buildout.

Methanol fuel for shipping barely exists as an industry today. Yet if the global shipping fleet fully converts to methanol fuel, the industry’s annual methanol demand could reach 100 million tons a year by 2050, according to a National Center for Energy Analytics projection. That raises the question the industry has been dancing around for years—where is all that methanol supposed to come from?

For most of the previous century, making methanol meant building a colossal, centralized plant near a cheap natural-gas supply. A new wave of startups is betting that the old formula is backwards for the low-carbon methanol needed for shipping. Instead of piping stranded methane to a plant, the new idea holds, it’s cheaper to bring a plant to the methane.

Today, Emvolon—an MIT spinout founded in 2021 by Emmanuel Kasseris and Leslie Bromberg—announced the details of an agreement to sell up to US $450 million of the company’s biomethanol and other liquid fuels over a seven-year period to Stamford, Connecticut-based commodities trader Freepoint Commodities. Kasseris says the deal will fund construction of Emvolon’s fleet of modular, container-size plants, which convert methane from landfills and other waste sites directly into ship fuel.

Engine-Based Syngas Methanol Production

Rather than engineering a conventional chemical reformer, Emvolon repurposes an off-the-shelf automotive engine to help produce methanol. Emvolon runs the engine “fuel rich” (meaning more fuel is injected into the cylinders than can be burned with the amount of air in the mix). As a result, the cylinders produce syngas—a mix of carbon monoxide and hydrogen—instead of burning methane all the way to carbon dioxide and water. Syngas is then synthesized into methanol. Kasseris says the approach cuts the capital cost of small-scale chemical production by an order of magnitude compared with a purpose-built reformer.

Each complete system is roughly container-sized and converts about 3,500 cubic meters of methane into 8 tons of methanol a day. Trucked to a landfill, wastewater plant, or flare stack, it turns a gas stream that would otherwise be vented or burned into a liquid fuel that leaves by ordinary tanker truck—no new pipeline required.

A metal box that looks like an ordinary shipping…