**4. Summary**

In this chapter, we discussed the utilisation of methane as the main component of natural gas that can be converted to methanol. We discussed various processes that can activate methane and convert it in a single step to methanol, including their feasibility, recent progress and challenges associated with the conventional and unconventional methods. We showed that these processes have advantages and disadvantages. However, most of them suffer from the low yield of methanol. The unconventional methods are long-term processes and still far away from practical. The low temperature route using heterogeneous catalysts has a great potential and can be alternative to the current industrial process as some catalytic systems were shown to activate methane at moderate reaction conditions using different oxidants. Nevertheless, the selectivity toward methanol is still low. Therefore, more effort is needed to design and synthesise robust and cheap catalysts that could convert methane directly and selectively to methanol using air as an oxidant in a continuous flow reaction system.

*Biogas - Recent Advances and Integrated Approaches*
