![]() Close to 7.6% of the world’s population lives in the region, with a steadily increasing oil and gas consumption. Other studies have found the Mediterranean to be a hotspot for solar and wind power, with strong persistent winds that can also become a hazard to floating structures. It was marked as a potential location in Patterson et al., 2019 for solar methanol islands, due to its high insolation. In our study, we are interested in determining the optimal locations to put such a device in the Mediterranean Sea. The carbon dioxide and hydrogen gasses react in a reactor, producing methanol. More explicitly, the device operates by extracting the atmospheric CO 2 dissolved in the seawater with an electrochemical extraction module and combines it with hydrogen gas, sourced from desalinated water that is separated into hydrogen and oxygen gas. The device is composed of floating photovoltaic panels used to power the extraction of carbon and production of the synthetic fuel. One such device that incorporates this process is the renewable energy powered methonal-producing island (referred to as a methanol island from now on), shown in Figure 1. After collection, the CO 2 can be combined with hydrogen to produce a synthetic fuel, which can then be used in place of fossil fuels, completing the anthropogenic carbon cycle, or stored, removing the carbon from the Earth’s carbon cycle. This method shifts a flow of seawater more acidic, causing the flow to release gaseous CO 2 that can then be collected. However, the environmental impact of such systems is poorly understood and requires further investigation.Īn alternative method to those described above involves the extraction of ocean CO 2 via an electrochemically induced pH swift. ![]() Island communities in these regions could benefit from the energy resource diversification and independence these systems could provide. When we simulate the production at these locations, a 10 L s −1 seawater inflow rate produced 494.21, 495.84, and 484.70 mL m −2 of methanol over the course of a year, respectively. ![]() These locations were also not co-located with areas with larger maximum significant wave heights, thereby avoiding areas with higher environmental risk. Within this context, optimal locations were found to be the Alboran, Cretan, and Levantine Sea due to the availability of insolation for the Alboran and Levantine Sea and availability of wind power for the Cretan Sea. The optimal locations were found to strongly depend on the power availability constraint, with most optimal locations providing the most solar and/or wind power, due to the limited effect the ocean surface variability had on the power requirements of methanol island. Data from 20 years of ocean and atmospheric simulation data were used to “force” the simulated methanol island. The island was numerically simulated with a purpose built python package pyseafuel. In this study, the optimal locations to place such a device in the Mediterranean Sea were determined, based on three main constraints: power availability, environmental risk, and methanol production capability. The island components include a carbon dioxide extractor, a desalinator, an electrolyzer, and a carbon dioxide-hydrogen reactor to complete this process. A methanol island, powered by solar or wind energy, indirectly captures atmospheric CO 2 through the ocean and combines it with hydrogen gas to produce a synthetic fuel.
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