Methods to increase the efficiency of production and purification installations of renewable methanol

This article presents methods to increase the efficiency of liquid methanol production and purification installations. Three solutions were proposed: CO₂ compression on the side of the CCS power plant, replacement of the throttle valve with an expander, and replacement of the heat exchanger with an ORC module. The calculation methodology was presented, and each concept was thermodynamically analyzed and compared with the reference variant. The installation for the synthesis of liquid methanol was integrated with a wind farm with a nominal power of 8 MW, a photovoltaic farm with a capacity of 2 MW (based on the measurements of the photovoltaic farm installed on the campus of the Silesian University of Technology in Poland), and a water electrolysis installation. This made it possible to increase the efficiency of the entire system to 52.41%, which corresponds to an increase in efficiency relative to the reference case of 3.57 pp. The synergy effect accompanying the use of CO₂ from CCS power plants was also noticed, consisting in a simultaneous increase in the efficiency of both the analyzed installation and the power plant.