Re-wiring petrochemical clusters
Impact of using alternative carbon sources for ethylene production
James Tonny Manalal (TU Delft - Energy and Industry)
M. Pérez-Fortes (TU Delft - Energy and Industry)
C.A. Ramirez (TU Delft - ChemE/Chemical Engineering)
More Info
expand_more
Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.
Abstract
To achieve climate change mitigation targets, defossilising the production of bulk chemicals like ethylene will be critical. These high-volume petrochemicals are typically produced from fossil-based feedstocks in industrial clusters, which are highly integrated in terms of mass and energy. Replacing fossil-based processes in interconnected industrial clusters can, therefore, impact such interactions and decrease performance or cause lock-in situations at the cluster level. This has, however, been overlooked in the literature. This paper addresses this knowledge gap by evaluating the impacts of replacing fossil-based ethylene production in an existing industrial cluster with processes that use Alternative Carbon Sources (ACS) such as biomass, CO2 and plastic waste. This study explicitly evaluates the performance of the ACS-based production routes at process and cluster levels by assessing changes in mass, energy, prices, CO2 emissions and water demand. The results show that due to the notable difference in product distribution, energy needs and waste generation, a complete re-wiring of the petrochemical cluster in terms of mass, energy and revenue will be required. The results also indicate that defossilising ethylene production in existing industrial clusters can result in a shifting of burden outside the cluster for byproduct production, which can lead to increasing fossil-fuel use outside the cluster. At process level, the main challenges to defossilise ethylene are access to large quantities of clean energy and the large investment costs. Under current market conditions, among the different options examined, plastic pyrolysis is the most competitive ACS-based technology with the lowest impact at the cluster level. However, this requires a large availability of plastic waste, which will be challenging given current recycling rates. Further improvements in waste valorisation and integration of renewable energy-based heating will also be required to make this technology environmentally appealing.
help_outline