versusCO2hydrogenation.PDFVIP

Proceedings of the 2014 International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Operations Management Bali, Indonesia, January 7 – 9, 2014 A comparative analysis of methanol production routes: synthesis gas versus CO2 hydrogenation Camila F. R. Machado, José Luiz de Medeiros and Ofélia F. Q. Araújo Department of Industrial Engineering Federal University of Rio de Janeiro Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Rita M. B. Alves Department of Chemical Engineering Polytechnic School, University of S?o Paulo Braskem S.A., S?o Paulo, Brazil Abstract The two processes are proposed to meet the demand for methanol production with focus in the reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) emission and operating costs. The first is the conventional process of methanol synthesis from syngas. The new process is the hydrogenation of CO2 for methanol production. This new process can be considered a green chemical process because it uses CO2 as raw material contributing to the mitigation of CO2 (major greenhouse gas). The simulation of this processes were carried out using the Aspen Hysys V7.3 software to assess energy consumption and CO2 emissions in addition to process conditions. The influence of various process conditions as pressure, H2/CO2 ratio and (H2-CO2)/(CO2+CO) were analyzed from different parameters as selectivity to methanol, CO and CO2conversion, methanol production. In all cases studied the processes were evaluated at 245 °C to produce 465 kta of methanol for define the behavior of the operation conditional, to compare the energy consumption and the CO2 emission of the two process. Keywords Methanol, Carbon Dioxide, Synthesis gas, Process simulation, CO2 emission 1. Introduction One of the most important chemical feedstock used in the chemical industry is methanol (MeOH), with a worldwide demand of approximately 50 MTA (Behrens et al. 2012). Methanol is used extensively in the plastics industry, as solvents in the pharmaceutical industry and on extraction of animal and plant products (as in the