(182a) Sustainable Natural Gas Converting Clusters

Natural gas is one of the primary energy sources in the world. Its abundance aids in meeting the global industrial demand for energy. Natural gas is primarily used to produce electricity and heat but is also utilized to produce value-added products such as synthetic crude, ammonia, methanol and hydrogen. Even though it is considered a cleaner burning-hydrocarbon compared to fossil fuels, carbon emissions released from the combustion of natural gas are still significant. This poses a major challenge to the natural gas sector especially as countries diversify away from fossil fuels (IEA, 2021). The use of renewable energy sources and resource integration methods can be used for emission reduction and to encourage sustainability. This includes the application of Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage (CCUS) and converting CO₂ to value added products. This work implements a multi-objective integration model to optimize a multi-product cluster in terms of the economic, emission footprint, and resource conservation. The cluster investigated consisted of Fischer Tropsch (F-T) synthetic crude production, methanol, ammonia, hydrogen and urea in addition to power and heat production from both natural gas and solar energy. The economic performance was quantified by the total profit, the emission footprint by the total amount of carbon dioxide emitted from the cluster, and the resource conservation was optimized by minimizing the total water consumption. A pareto surface was generated that shows the trade-off between the three objectives.

References:

IEA, (2021). Net Zero by 2050: A Roadmap for the Global Energy Sector. International Energy Agency