Design and Performance Comparison of Methanol Production Processes with Carbon Dioxide Utilization

Yih-Hang Chen, David Shan-Hill Wong, Ya-Chien Chen, Chao-Min Chang and Hsuan Chang
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Yih-Hang Chen: Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering, Tamkang University, New Taipei City 25137, Taiwan
David Shan-Hill Wong: Department of Chemical Engineering, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu 30013, Taiwan
Ya-Chien Chen: Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering, Tamkang University, New Taipei City 25137, Taiwan
Chao-Min Chang: Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering, Tamkang University, New Taipei City 25137, Taiwan
Hsuan Chang: Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering, Tamkang University, New Taipei City 25137, Taiwan

Energies, 2019, vol. 12, issue 22, 1-18

Abstract: Carbon dioxide recycling is one of the possible contributions to CO 2 mitigation and provides an opportunity to use a low-cost carbon source. Methanol is a commodity chemical that serves as an important basic chemical and energy feedstock with growing demand. For each of the four types of industrial methanol production processes from natural gas (methane), i.e., steam reforming (SR), autothermal reforming (ATR), combined reforming (CR), and two-step reforming (TSR), CO 2 utilization cases of (A) no utilization, (B) as reforming step feedstock, and (C) as methanol synthesis step feedstock were designed based on common industrial operation conditions and analyzed for energy consumption, exergy loss (EX loss ), net CO 2 reduction (NCR) and internal rate of return (IRR). The utilization of CO 2 can reduce energy consumption. The processes with the lowest and the highest EX loss are SR and ATR, respectively. All SR processes give negative NCR. All the B-type processes are positive in NCR except B-SR. The highest NCR is obtained from the B-ATR process with a value of 0.23 kg CO 2 /kg methanol. All the processes are profitable with positive IRR results and the highest IRR of 41% can be obtained from B-ATR. The utilization of CO 2 in the industrial methanol process can realize substantial carbon reduction and is beneficial to process economics.

Keywords: carbon dioxide utilization; methanol process; net carbon reduction; methane reforming (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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