Methanol is an attractive liquid energy carrier and one of the most important intermediates in the chemical industry [1–3]. Around 90% of its global production is based on the commercial process comprising (i) production of syngas (a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide), via either partial oxidation or steam-reforming of methane–the major component of natural gas, and (ii) catalytic conversion of syngas to methanol [4]. The syngas production is operated autothermally in the temperature range 800–1000 C through combustion of more than 25% of the feedstock, resulting in only 65% thermodynamic efficiency [4–6]. It is thus highly capital-and energy-intensive [7] and, consequently, commercially-viable only when conducted on a large scale (> 1 Mt/year)[4, 6, 7]. This makes the existing process unsuitable for valorization of the sizeable amounts of the natural gas that are currently flared at numerous, but decentralized and low-capacity, stranded shale oil fields, as the high global warming potential of methane precludes its release to the environment [8]. Considering that stranded natural gas amounts to more than one-third of global conventional natural gas reserves [9, 10], successful development and commercialization of a scale-flexible hence low–capital methane-to-methanol (MtM) process is of paramount importance for efficient and sustainable exploitation of the most abundant remaining fossil fuel on the planet [4, 6, 11, 12].