Abstract: Methanol distillation process has high energy consumption and water consumption, therefore, energy saving is of vital significance to increasing the economic benefit of methanol plant. This paper, based on a 400kt/a methanol plant consisting of three distillation columns, reuses the waste heat produced in the distillation process to preheat the feed to distillation column. The optimized process can not only reduce the heat load of the bottom reboilers for pre-distillation column and pressurized column, but also reduce the heat load of product cooler in the pressurized column, thus reducing the consumption of steam and cooling water and achieving energy saving, consumption reduction and investment reduction. The data in this paper mainly comes from the simulation software PROⅡ and the heat exchanger calculation software HTRI. A comparative analysis of three different heat transfer networks for methanol distillation process is carried out, and Scheme No. 3 is selected as the best one

Key words: production of refined methanol, energy saving, optimization of heat transfer process, economic benefit