would thf or mtbe use as a cosolvent significantly "speed" the reaction enough to use a lower starting amount of base in a 180 liter sized batch? there seems to be a very sparse amount of information about such techniques. all i found is 1.25:1 tetrahydrofuran added in ratio volume to methanol will allow 96% conversion in 15 minutes - room temperature reaction.

THF is awfully expensive to use in a reaction, a quote I saw online for THF in a 20L pail, was almost 400 bucks, so you're looking at like $20/Liter... Can you recover this co-solvent? otherwise it seems like using this would make your process extremely expensive...

Why would you want to use MTBE considering all of the risks related to it? (dare you spill some...) It's been banned in California and New York, as it's leached itself into water sources, and hence contaminated them...

tetrahydrofuran is cheaper by the drum than most people pay for methanol about 175 bucks. it might even be cheaper by the truckload than methanol but i doubt it. mtbe is about double price of methanol. they are both really cheap considering you would recover all of it.

if people who are from california or new york and allowed to ban things, those are definately the people you should let go strait through your ears without stopping pretty much anything they say. what exactly did it leach out of? and why would ethers be more contaminating than then benzene or old polycarbonate from old useless broken solar panels? ask anyone who physically voted for those bans- see if they can actually respond with a coherent sentence.