The next stage of rediscovery that I had to follow was the actual conversion of syngas into methanol. Syngas is mostly just carbon monoxide, hydrogen, and carbon dioxide. The conversion process is similar to others we've already constructed with pressurized gas going into a reaction chamber with a catalyst, then recovering the partially completed product before looping it back. I'm thankful that I remembered that metallic copper is the catalyst involved in this reaction, so the only real variables I needed to rediscover were exactly how much pressure we needed, and what sort of scrubbing we'll need to do on the syngas to remove the minor impurities still present in the stream.

The way I've gone about this is by building a smaller pressure variable chamber, and using stone shaping to pressurize it. In our other high pressure situations, we've utilized liquefied gases boiling to bring the pressure up in a closed system, for this, I'll have to design an actual compressor to get the gas pressure to the necessary ranges.

Since my only real way of measuring pressure is against atmospheric pressure, that's what I used. The end result of 55 days of research was that the reaction proceeded at a fairly reasonable pace at about 50 times atmospheric pressure, and at about 500 degrees. The amount of methanol produced was pretty high, though after a few test cycles, it became clear that I needed to clarify the syngas somehow. In short, there was enough residual trace compounds that the copper catalyst slowly became less effective.

Just from observation, it seems like the two major problematic materials still in the syngas were some amount of ashy substances, and sulfur based gases. The ashy substances would build up on the copper wool I was using, clogging it, and the copper itself was slowly becoming what I assume to be copper sulfide. The copper sulfide could just be re-reduced to copper, but opening up a pressure chamber to do that seems like a waste. Instead, we can utilize our existing zinc reserves to act as a sacrificial metal during the initial purification steps. We can take crushed zinc oxide, and run the gases through it, then once it has formed into zinc sulfide again, we can roast it to reform zinc oxide.

A nice byproduct of doing this is the recovery of the sulfur as sulfur dioxide, which we can use for making sulfuric acid. There are three other changes I'd like to make to the syngas production line to hopefully further reduce impurities. I want to produce the gas at a high temperature to hopefully break down any of the larger organics that might have been present as the first step. Second, I'd like to bubble the remaining gas through a dilute sodium hydroxide, then hydrochloric acid solution, then through neutral water last. Finally, if the gas hasn't cooled enough by then, I want to bring it down to a fairly cold temperature to condense most of the water out. The hope being that all that bubbling through liquids will pull most particulate matter out, and that any reactive substances, save for carbon monoxide and hydrogen gas, will react with the acid and bases and also be removed.

I continued to trudge forward with various aspects of filtration for syngas. While I'd wait for steps of the process to complete, I started doing some experiments with gas compression. I had many concerns with how exactly I'd get the gas compressed to the pressures necessary mechanically without plastics, rubber, or computer aided machining. However, I was struck by inspiration while I went into the city to buy food one day.

While a demon was frying food in the dwarven method, the handle on a pot full of oil came off. Well, to say the handle came off was wrong, the stone sheath on the handle cracked and slid off the rest of the handle. I asked if there was anything I could do to help, and they told me they'd normally just have someone with stoneshaping fix it later by reforming the stone directly along the handle, so I obliged them. The handle was very slightly bulbous at the far end, letting the stone grip the rest of the metal, but when it cracked it could slide off along the cracked bit. That gave me the idea to use acid washed lightstone as the casing material for a piston.

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I don't need to have a computer aided machine, I just need a lathe that I can make a near perfect cylinder on. The casing for the piston doesn't actually need to be machined, it can just be made from stone formed around the outside of the piston with stoneshaping. If the piston head is long enough, then the tolerance and leakage of gas should be minimal. If the syngas is initially at atmospheric pressure, then we could either use a single piston to compress it 60:1, or more realistically, use a few stages of pistons to get it to that level.

All that to say, I've gone on a short detour over the last 20 days making a lathe, and it should be ready to use soon.

Once the lathe was done, it took a little bit of time to actually get used to using it. Thanks to the amount of ambient mana due to having the extra-large mana crystal in our city, powering devices like this with smaller mana engines is pretty easy. In fact, this mana powered lathe is so convenient that after I finish what I'm doing with pistons, I'm going to try to get the mechanical team to make a few more of them and distribute them to the blacksmiths around the city. Honestly, things like a drill press and other machining equipment will probably go a long ways toward improving the quality of manufactured goods.

After a good 33 days of tinkering with designs, I came up with an automatic mechanical piston design that used a spring for the exit valve, and a side hole for the inlet to mechanically compress gas effectively. The spring in the exit valve will need replaced occasionally, but that can ultimately be chocked up as part of routine maintenance. Other aspects of the piston will probably need tuning after that period of time anyway, so that should be fine.

The extra filtration of the syngas seemed to be doing the trick as well, with far less of the copper catalyst going bad over hundreds of hours of syngas processing, even if the scale was relatively small. I made a few dozen gallons of methanol during my testing, though it wasn't pure, still containing a decent amount of water, and likely some other compounds. I'll need to do some purification on it, but as is, I'm ready to have some of the construction process started. Purifying the end product should just be a matter of distillation.

Construction has begun on the methanol facility. Since methanol itself isn't that important of a secret, we're building it somewhat close to the paper facility, since a large amount of it will be used in the paper bleaching process. The facility will also produce it's own charcoal pellets for the gasifier process, reducing transport needs. It also allowed me to control the quality of the charcoal better than the old charcoal facility. This one is going to produce very high quality charcoal using better engineering designs and higher temperatures to produce purer carbon. That should also help extend the lifecycle of the other components in the process.

Construction is on hold, however, as we're currently in the middle of a very severe storm. I'd been working on a three stage distillation process for our methanol for 34 days when the weather started to get bad. It started with the wind picking up and the ocean getting choppy, and by the next day, it was clear we were in a hurricane. This one is really bad too. Everyone is hunkered down, and I'm sure there will be significant damage to parts of the island. Even if the sea walls hold, the amount of rain is almost certainly going to cause mudslides, and potentially even landslides in the area.

I'm very concerned about our various industrial locations. It can take months to repair industrial facilities if they're damaged, and the more facilities that are compromised, the more the problem can compound on itself. Without the sea walls or the dam, I'm almost certain that the damage would be worse than the storm that led to me building the dam and levees in the first place, the rain and wind are just that bad right now.

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