On the assessment of renewable industrial processes: Case study for solar co-production of methanol and power

Henrik von Storch, Martin Roeb, Hannes Stadler, Christian Sattler, André Bardow and Bernhard Hoffschmidt

Applied Energy, 2016, vol. 183, issue C, 132 pages

Abstract: The transition to renewable energies has mainly happened in the field of electric energy. In industrial processes only a negligible share of the energy consumption is supplied by renewable energies. To increase this share, several processes were proposed in the past. However, for a meaningful evaluation and optimization of such processes, no appropriate criterion exists. In particular, renewable energy is still the limited resource. To identify the best use of renewable energy, a new evaluation procedure for renewable industrial processes is proposed. The novel procedure is applied to the co-production of electricity and methanol from solar energy and natural gas. The SOLME process for solar methanol production is proposed, optimized and evaluated with the proposed criterion. The results indicate that the proposed SOLME process can make more efficient use of the solar energy than conventional solar power plants. Hence, the solar methanol production is promising to initiate a further penetration of solar energy into the chemical industry.

Keywords: Process evaluation; Renewable energy integration; Solar reforming; Solar fuels; CSP; Process simulation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261916312508
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:appene:v:183:y:2016:i:c:p:121-132

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/405891/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 405891/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2016.08.141

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Energy is currently edited by J. Yan

More articles in Applied Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().