Astronomers found a methanol cloud 288 million miles across drifting in space
Methanol, the simplest alcohol, turns up in camping stoves, windscreen fluid and the chemistry of plastics. It also floats between the stars. In 2006 radio astronomers at Jodrell Bank spotted a cloud of it hundreds of millions of miles wide, and methanol now helps them locate regions where new stars are forming.
Chemically it is just a methyl group bonded to a hydroxyl group, a clear, volatile, flammable liquid that smells like drinking alcohol but is far more toxic. Its old name, wood alcohol, comes from how it was once made, by heating wood without air. Ancient Egyptians used such wood products in embalming, and Robert Boyle first isolated the pure liquid in 1661 by distilling boxwood. In 1834 Jean-Baptiste Dumas and Eugène Péligot worked out its composition and coined methylène from Greek words for wine and wood, the root of methyl and of the chemist's suffix -yl. The name methanol was fixed in 1892.
Industrial production began at Leuna in Germany in 1923, using a BASF process that turned synthesis gas into methanol at 300 to 400 °C and hundreds of atmospheres. In 1966 ICI introduced copper and zinc oxide catalysts that work at far lower pressure, and more than 20 million tons are now made every year. Most becomes formaldehyde for plastics, with more going into acetic acid and the petrol additive MTBE.
As a fuel it has a long, uneven record. German wartime rockets burned it, and during the oil shocks of the 1970s it drew attention as a motor fuel; by the mid-1990s the United States had over 20,000 cars able to run on it, until cheap petrol ended the programme. It holds less energy per litre than ethanol or petrol, yet it stores more easily than hydrogen, breaks down in groundwater within days and is gaining ground in shipping and in Chinese industrial boilers.
Small amounts even exist naturally in the human body, partly from pectin in fruit; one study measured a mean of 4.5 parts per million in breath. In 2016 astronomers also detected it in the planet-forming disc around the young star TW Hydrae.
Source: Methanol
