“Methanol releases fewer pollutant gases than traditional marine fuels, such as sulfur oxides (SOx), nitrogen oxides (NOx), and particulate”
This 100 times this^^
Methanol has no sulfur, it doesn’t make particulates and you can run it with a fuel air mix that NOx doesn’t form. Marine diesels are some of the most polluting on the planet each putting out as much as a million card worth. Of this criteria pollutants.
As a added bonus you can make methanol from anything with carbon in it once you gasification plant it. CO + H2 = Methanol at high efficiency. That could be gasified coal, peat,wood or crop wastes,, municipal trash, sewage sludge, harbor dredging spoils,biomass from salt water agriculture, algae, kelp,water hydrilla, the dreaded kudzu killing the South anything that grows anywhere land or ocean based.
Then you can also go from CO2 +3H2 = Methanol this opens up electrons or heat to methanol. Curtailment wind in the middle of the night , or solar in the Sahara. Better yet nuclear power off peak build out fast sodium reactors and run them flat out use the off peak to turn seawater into methanol. Ask the US Navy they already perfected the tech it takes seawater puts it into a bipolar electrolytic cell where the CO2 in the water comes out first then H2 gas you get the co2 for free as the Gibbs energy is lower than H2. Seawater has 150 times the CO2 as air it makes absolute sense to harvest CO2 from seawater so much so the Navy plans to make jet fuel with this tech and it’s carrier’s reactors at sea. They flew a jet already on the JP5 they made using nothing but electric power and seawater. You could also get bulk CO2 from any ethanol plant cheaply, same for brewers, and any sewage plant fermenter bulk CO2 is $50 per tonne on the industrial market cheaper if you have rail access. Water plus CO2 plus any form of electrons = Methanol. Nuclear,Hydro,geothermal,high latitude wind, desert solar all will never run out. Methanol is a vehicle to move carbon and hydrogen. It’s easy to make , three times denser than Hydrogen and can as an industrial chemical be turned into thousands of products from plastics to lubricants to protein powder for animal feed <<< the Chinese are going coal to methanol to complete protein for pig feed right now today.
Methanol also can be used in flexfuel vehicles directly or via the Mobil process to gasoline with a nice by product of propane also a top notch heavy vehicle fuel for clean exhaust.
I was an O2 bomb generator tech back in the day. I can't fathom putting seawater into the cells!