Methanol is an important intermediate compound in energy industry. Using natural gas, it can be produced via synthesis gas, which is an energy intensive process or directly through methane selective oxidation. Although selective oxidation is an attractive alternative this process remains a challenge due to low methane conversion and the production of undesirable by-products. Therefore, this project proposes to study the selective methanol oxidation in order to investigate  the viability of methanol through this direct process. The aim is to compare the energy input for the two processes, direct and indirect. Two flow sheets were built in CoCo simulator (3.6) andparametric studies were performed In Scliab (6.1.1) to get better values forS, M ratios and conversion as well. Finally, an energetic balance was performed, and the two routes were compared. Considering that Mozambique is one of the countries, that holds substantial natural gas reserves, around 100 trillion cubic feet direct conversion of methane to methanol should represent an economical alternative to make feasible more natural gas reserves since transportation of liquefied natural gas is also rather costly. The simulation results show that the classical route produces 1320.61 mol/s methanol, the overall methane conversion is 94% and the overall methanol/methane selectivity is 87%. The direct route produces 1302mol/s of methanol, the overall methane conversion is 93% and the methanol selectivity is 85%. Comparing the two routes, the classical methanol synthesis is still advantageous in terms of yield, which agrees with previous work as mentioned in the literature; however, the energy requirement analysis is still a research topic.

Key words: Methane, ATR, Syngas, Methanol synthesis