While I am definitely not a fan of the car CULTure, which I believe needs to be phased out as quickly as possible, there are some remote systems for which self-propelled machines are necessary, tractors for farms, for one example, ambulances, delivery vehicles, and certainly emergency vehicles like helicopters, fire trucks etc. DME is the perfect fuel for these applications; I cannot after all of these years think of any portable fuel that based on a combinatorial analysis will score as well.
DME can substitute for any application for which dangerous natural gas is used, with the caveat that in some spaces, the use of different sealing materials is required. The difference between DME and dangerous natural gas is that methane is a greenhouse gas, the second most important driver after carbon dioxide after climate change. This is a function of its relatively long atmospheric lifetime which is on the order of decades. By contrast, the average lifetime of DME is about a week.
One could combust DME in homes that now use natural gas, and in fact, those using propane or other forms of LPG. Like propane and LPG, DME is easily liquified, and it is a better refrigerant than either.
The critical temperature of DME is about 150C, meaning that under certain circumstances it can transport heat as a liquid, and in theory therefore, it could be used without combusting it in heat pumps to provide local heating. This is something of a long shot, but one could imagine systems where one uses DME in one case as a heat pump, or if its heat has been exhausted by use in this fashion, then by combustion.
It is, frankly, a wonder fuel, and the reason it is not used is not because it's not better than everything else, but it is because of bad habits. Like the much hyped and in my view silly affection for hydrogen, DME is not a primary source of energy. It is stored energy, albeit thermodynamically superior to all that battery crap people keep advocating, a disaster waiting to happen. (It is happening, and history will not forgive us for it.) DME can be manufactured by increasing the efficiency - recovering exergy - of high temperature devices, nuclear energy being the only sustainable and environmentally acceptable means of providing this heat, as part of a heat exchange network.
Unlike the appalling bourgeois idiot Amory Lovins, I don't view energy efficiency as a tool for reducing energy use, but rather one for expanding energy use by extending it to the billions of people who currently lack access, aka "poor people." This is consistent with human development goals.
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