(371af) Low-Cost Resource Management Considering Life Cycle Impacts

Efficient management of resources is essential to achieve the goals of sustainable development. Many studies in Process Systems Engineering have considered resource management, proposing methods that support optimal decisions when designing integrated systems. These approaches implement Process Integration principles, allowing the exchange of resources across different processing options to optimize the performance of energy systems, water management networks, CO₂ integration, decarbonization technologies, and more. The optimization usually aims to minimize the costs under environmental considerations. Many of these methods have limited scope as to the processes and resources they consider and the environmental footprints they account for. This might lead to a short-sighted analysis since dismissing an inclusive set of footprints can result in unintended outcomes. Hence, there is a need for a generic method that allows the flexible representation of integrated resource management systems and the different environmental impacts. This work proposes a comprehensive dynamic optimization framework for resource management that considers synergetic opportunities for resource integration across multiple processing units. This approach integrates economic accounting with life cycle assessment for synthesizing optimal resource management systems. The life cycle impact is considered through different footprints associated with technology implementation, importing resources (upstream footprint), and exporting resources (downstream footprints). The method is demonstrated in a case study where it is applied to design net-zero energy vectors. This flexible approach can guide planners, policymakers, and other stakeholders to make insightful decisions when addressing various resource management problems.