Hydrogen, ethylene and power production from bioethanol : are we ready for the renewable market?
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Data di Pubblicazione:
2019
Citazione:
Hydrogen, ethylene and power production from bioethanol : are we ready for the renewable market? / I. Rossetti, A. Tripodi, E. Bahadori, G. Ramis. ((Intervento presentato al 26. convegno NAM : meeting of the North American Catalysis Society tenutosi a Chicago nel 2019.
Abstract:
Hydrogen, ethylene and power production from bioethanol: are we ready for the renewable market?
Ilenia Rossetti1*, Antonio Tripodi 1, Elnaz Bahadori2, Gianguido Ramis2
1Dip. di Chimica, Università degli Studi di Milano, CNR-ISTM and INSTM Unit-Milano università, Milan (Italy)
2 DICCA, Università degli Studi di Genova and INSTM Unit-Genova, Genoa (Italy)
* ilenia.rossetti@unimi.it
Introduction
The economic sustainability of renewable based sources is a matter of debate and the technology is changing very fast. We here considered three examples of exploitation of bioethanol as renewable source: a) centralised hydrogen production; b) heat and power cogeneration (residential scale); c) ethylene production. Bioethanol can be a suitable starting material for the production of H2, as fuel or chemical, or syngas for its conventional uses. After designing the process and the implementation of kinetic expressions based on experimental data collected in our lab and derived from the literature, an economic evaluation and sensitivity analysis allowed to assess the economic sustainability of hydrogen production and purification by the steam reforming of bioethanol. The attention was mainly put on diluted bioethanol solutions, easy to purify and cost effective. The centralised hydrogen production from bioethanol was considered cost effective at least starting from diluted bioethanol from first generation crops. The main items affecting the exploitation potential were the market hydrogen price and bioethanol cost, the process being OPEX (OPerating EXpenditures) sensitive. On the other hand, when dowscaling the hydrogen production and purification unit to feed a 5 kW fuel cell, the most undetermined item was the fuel cell cost, since no fixed market price is still available. Therefore, the sustainability of the process strictly depends on the possibility to build cheap equipment and to guarantee long time reliability for the plant life. Also in this case, however, the system was OPEX-sensitive, the economic sustainability mainly depending on the bioethanol cost and the electricity selling price.
Finally, ethylene market is steadily increasing by ca. 4% each year due to economic growth. The current production technologies rely on very well established processes form fossil sources, such as ethane and propane, refinery gas, light naphtha and fuel oil feedstocks. Different technologies are adapted to the main feeds or versatile plants are designed to cope with different raw materials depending on their availability and price. Reliable technologies are optimised, leading to giant plants with overall yearly production capacity over 150 million ton/year. Nevertheless, the demand for renewable ethylene, as well as the increasing oil price experienced in the recent past, suggested the development of alternative routes to ethylene. Based on the increasing availability of ethanol form renewable biomass, bioethanol-to-bioethylene processes have been recently designed, finding economic sustainability, at the moment, in Brazil.
Materials and Methods
Process simulation was carried out with the AspenONE Engineering Suite® (v. 8.6), in particular with the Aspen Plus® process simulator, and with the Aspen Process Economic Analysis® tool.
Results and Discussion
The layout of the hydrogen production process has been optimized on a large scale to convert 40,000 ton/year of bioethanol. The small scale cogeneration unit (ca. 7 Nm3/h H2) was designed according to experimental testing of an apparatus for the combined heat and power cogeneration (CHP) with output 5 kWelectrical + 5 kWthermal. Both systems were constituted by several reactors in series for hydrogen production (Reformer), purification through High-Temperature Water Gas Shift (H
Tipologia IRIS:
14 - Intervento a convegno non pubblicato
Elenco autori:
I. Rossetti, A. Tripodi, E. Bahadori, G. Ramis
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