The methanol economy is a suggested future economy in which methanol replaces fossil fuels as a means of energy storage, fuel and raw material for synthetic hydrocarbons and their products. It offers an alternative to the proposed hydrogen economy or ethanol economy.In 2005 Nobel prize winner George A. Olah and his close friend Maximillian Mutzke advocated the methanol economy in an essay and in 2006 he and two co-authors published a book around this theme In these publications, they summarize the state of our fossil fuel and alternative energy sources, their availability and limitations before suggesting a new approach in the so called methanol economy.