(566b) Seawater-Air-Sunlight Based Industrial Clusters for Carbon Dioxide Utilization

Climate change is an increasingly important crisis, and efforts must be directed towards it in order to lessen its threat and achieve sustainability on a global scale. One method of addressing the climate change crisis is by applying circular economy, in which resources are conserved and emissions may be reduced. Together, the power and industry sectors are responsible for most global carbon dioxide emissions, which significantly promote climate change. Carbon capture and sequestration (CCUS) systems can be used to reduce carbon dioxide emissions through reusing carbon dioxide and utilizing it to produce value added products. A resource integration framework (Ahmed et al. 2020) identifies materials for material exchange and assesses the impact of energy reuse and renewable energy on the system. This allows for an eco-industrial park to be designed, in which emissions are captured and utilized through resource integration, and sustainability and circularity are achieved.

A three-stage approach was developed in this work to design a carbon dioxide negative eco-industrial park that can convert carbon dioxide into value-added products. The first stage is process identification, where candidate plants are selected based on the cluster's objective and inputs. The objective here is to convert carbon dioxide using seawater, air, and sunlight. Therefore, the cluster must incorporate processes that can utilize carbon dioxide and process the input natural resources into functional forms. The inputs are converted into these useful forms through desalination, air separation, and solar electrical technologies. A reverse osmosis process produces water and brine from seawater, an air separation process separates air into oxygen and nitrogen, and a photovoltaic system and a concentrated solar power system use sunlight to produce the electricity needed to power the cluster. Therefore, identification of these processes is critical and performed through a stage-gate selection process. In the second stage, called the data collection stage, information related to each of the selected processes, such as its resource balances and associated economics, are collected. In the third and final stage, resource network optimization, information collected in the previous stage helps identify the cluster's optimal configurations to meet the specified economic and environmental objectives using a mixed-integer linear programming model. An illustrative example demonstrates how the model synthesizes carbon negative networks through optimization for different objectives while achieving a profit. The conversion of carbon dioxide into value-added products through natural resource inputs and renewable energy sources in the clusters designed, therefore, achieve overall economic and environmental benefits. The outcomes of this work reinforce industrial parks as a means to transition to circular economies.

Ahmed R, Shehab S, Al-Mohannadi DM, Linke P. Synthesis of integrated processing clusters. Chem Eng Sci. 2020. doi:10.1016/j.ces.2020.115922