Methanol Pros And Cons

As humans progressively use more and more oil, our supply of oil goes down. The depletion of oil has become a problem that people are addressing constantly. Many alternative forms of energy have been developed but no method has proved totally efficient and economic. However, Methanol could prove to be the solution the human race is looking for. Methanol could be used to replace gasoline in our cars for future years to come. Methanol is easy to make because it originates from our trash and biomass. That means that we won’t have to dig or frack for Methanol like we do for oil. When it comes to efficiency, Methanol shockingly wins that category over gasoline which is another advantage to converting to Methanol. On the other hand, Methanol has
For methanol production, biomass is needed to produce the gas. If we become completely dependent on Methanol to power our cars, this means a herculean amount of food would be used to make gas. This would ultimately drive food prices up and there would be more stress on farmers to produce food. This would make it harder for people with little money to buy food and for farms to purchase food for their livestock. Secondly, methanol is especially volatile, much more than gasoline. For people who live in cold areas, this is bad news. Cars in cold climates could experience the Methanol freezing in their tanks. For scientists, this proves to be a hard issue to get around if we are considering switching completely to Methanol powered cars. Lastly, when Methanol is put in our tanks, it has shown to be corrosive. Experiments have been held where scientists recorded Methanol corroding gas tanks and wires. Clearly, if we want to use Methanol, we either have to alter the Methanol so this does not happen or change what the gas tanks are made of. All of these disadvantages present obstacles for us when looking at alternative fuels, but if we can find ways around the cons, methanol could be a great option for us. Switching our cars from gasoline powered to Methanol powered is not as difficult as one may think. In the 1990’s, California put 15,000 menthol powered cars on the road and the experiment turned out to be a success. This shows that making cars that can run on Methanol will not present a challenge for us. The reason why this experiment stopped was due to fuel becoming too expensive because people were only making this fuel for 15,000 cars. However,