A multipurpose reduced chemical-kinetic mechanism for methanol combustion comprising 8 overall reactions and 11 reacting chemical species is presented. The development starts by investigating the minimum set of elementary reactions needed to describe methanol combustion with reasonable accuracy over a range of conditions of temperature, pressure, and composition of interest in combustion. Starting from a 27-step mechanism, previously tested and found to give accurate predictions of ignition processes for these conditions, it is determined that addition of 11 elementary reactions taken from its basis (San Diego) mechanism extends the validity of the description to premixed-flame propagation, strain-induced extinction of nonpremixed flames, and equilibrium composition and temperatures, giving results that compare favorably with experimental measurements and also with computations using the 247-step detailed San Diego mechanism involving 50 reactive species. Specifically, premixedflame propagation velocities and extinction strain rates for nonpremixed counterflow flames calculated with the 38-step mechanism show departures from experimental measurements and detailed-chemistry computations that are roughly on the order of 10%, comparable with expected experimental uncertainties. Similar accuracy is found in comparisons of autoignition times over the range considered, except at very high temperatures, under which conditions the computations tend to overpredict induction times for all of the chemistry descriptions tested. From this 38-step mechanism the simplification is continued by introducing steadystate approximations for the intermediate species CH 3 , CH 4 , HCO, CH 3 O, CH 2 OH, and O, leading to an 8-step reduced mechanism that provides satisfactory accuracy for all conditions tested. The flame computations indicate that thermal diffusion has a negligible influence on methanol combustion in all cases considered and that a mixture-average species-transport model is sufficiently accurate for premixed and nonpremixed flames, whereas for the former an even simpler constant-Lewis-number description gives equally satisfactory results.