Market Positioning
The production of DME is restricted by market demands in spite of its high profit and economic returns as chemical feedstock or intermediates, and there will not have a vast market room for DME in a relative long period.

However, the demands for diesel will soar with increasing consumption for petroleum and economic development in China. China is a country with relatively low petroleum reserves but rich coal resources, furthermore, history coal exploration is much longer than that of petroleum. It’s of strategic significance for China to take advantage of rich coal resources to convert into clean fuel as an alternative of petroleum products. As it can be seen, besides development of downstream products as chemical feedstock, there’s a vast potential market for DME to be used as a fuel. This market has already drawn focuses from both home and abroad.

  Technology Goal
We adopt the facility of catalytic dehydration of methanol with patent jointly owned by Sichuan Tianyi Technology Co., Ltd and Southwestern Chemical Industry Design Institute. The method constitutes processes of vaporization of methanol, dehydration, condensation, repeated distillation and purification.

Our project adopts the advanced technique of catalytic dehydration of methanol. The material goes through oil segregator into the methanol synthetic tower to be synthesized into crude methanol which will enter the aether tower together with hydrogen and nitrogen. The methanol will be dehydrated into DME under certain conditions of temperature, pressure, and catalyzers, the mixture of methanol and DME will be cooled and put into the segregator, and the separated gases will be further refined. The purity of DME will reach up to 99.9%. The mixture of methanol and ether can be the substitute of LPG. This technique has less processes, consumes less energy but with high quality products.

With our years of experiences in technology and management, together with self-owned intellectual properties, we are sure to form our production advantages.

  Conditions for Setting Plants
Stirred by the prosperous future of DME, as well as the maturing of production techniques, more and more DME projects are being initiated or plan to be initiated in China. Massive production of DME to the annual capacity of 1 mt from 100 kt, and current 10 kt will be the trend. One-step method will be adopted as the production technique, and coal and natural gas will be used as feedstock dependent on local resources.

By far there are 6 coal/natural gas chemical bases in China where DME production lines with an annual capacity of 600 kt are planned to be initiated. In Linyi, Shandong Province, the DME production line with an annual capacity of 1 million tons, largest in scale all over world by far and costing 4-billion RMM yuan, will be built. DME will be an substitute of diesel as automobile fuel, which will made up of the shortage of petroleum reserve in China.

To compete with petroleum products as fuels, DME facilities shall meet the criteria of low investment, low prices of feedstock, and up a certain production scale. By utilizing the idling production capacity, utilities and infrastructure, as well as managerial and technical personnel of our existing ammonia plant, we are able to reduce the total investment, thus making up the shortcoming of higher feedstock prices. Besides, the shorter transportation distance will reduce the costs of our products.

It’s not wise to take coal as the feedstock, for China’s coal reserve only stands for 50 years of exploration. While, the rich reserve of natural gas can satisfy more than 100 years of usage, furthermore, west-to-east gas pipeline has already been able to supply gas for our plant. Based on those conditions, we are planning to launch a production line with an annual capacity of 600 kt.