Exporting Solar Methanol

Melbourne June 05, 2008 -IN A SIGNIFICANT milestone, the foundations for the world's largest solar dish were poured only 48 hours ago at an Australian National University site.Just in time for World Environment Day today, the project is being hailed by a group of renewable energy experts as the first step towards converting Australia's fossil-fuel based economy into a major exporter of "liquid sunshine" - that is methanol - a favourite with some racing car drivers.

A 500-square-metre parabolic dish - that's bigger than an average house block - consisting of 424 mirrored panels will be erected over coming months as a prototype for a solar farm planned for Whyalla, South Australia.

Private company Wizard Power has partnered with the solar thermal boffins at the ANU, led by Keith Lovegrove, to build what they say will be the first renewable energy power station capable of producing electricity around the clock by the end of next year.

Combined with an ammonia-based storage system, the solar thermal concentrator will not only create carbon emission-free base load power, its technology could also be used to one day solve the widening oil crisis and supplant high-earning coal exports, Prof Lovegrove said in Melbourne this week.

"The biggest risk for the Australian economy out of adapting to climate change is not reducing our own emissions, but losing our biggest export when the rest of the world stops buying our coal . . . that exposes us
to more risk," Prof Lovegrove said.

"It's dead obvious, we have to find a way of exporting energy in greater volumes than our gas resources can produce and with higher value than uranium can generate."

Prof Lovegrove's idea for a "fully sustainable future" would have farmers growing salt water algae - which he says produces about 40 times more biomass than food crops per hectare.

Once harvested the algae would be "gasified" at 700 degrees Celsius in massive pressure cookers powered by energy from solar dishes.

The resulting methane gas would be put under another high-pressure industrial process and emerge as methanol.

Original Source: Olga Golacho Herald Sun Melbourne