(184b) Process Design, Simulation and Techno-Economy Analysis of the Green Ammonia Production from Produced Water

It has been reported that 50 million barrels of produced water are coming out every day from approximately 900,000 oil wells in the United States. The produced water, PW, is highly toxic containing mineral salts, heavy and rare earth metals and can be a major source of water contamination when re-injected underground. Attempts have been made to treat PW through various technologies developed for water desalination over the past few years. The supercritical water and oxidation (SCWDO) technology, recently developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, has been one of the novel technologies introduced to produce drinking water from PW. AspenHysys as the most popular and commonly used process simulation tool, has been utilized to design various hydrogen production processes. Recently, the process design has been programmed to use flare gas to produce blue hydrogen from the steam methane reforming, SMR reaction, and PW which would be considered as a great advancement towards decarbonization and net zero policy by 2050. In this research proposal, AspenHysys V.14, will be used to design a process to produce green ammonia from PW. Ammonia, as a strategic chemical, is widely used in various industries such as agricultural and medical. The current market value of ammonia has been reported to be 75.7 billion U.S. dollars in 2022 and is anticipated to reach 103.8 billion U.S. dollars in 2028. Ammonia has recently been used as a clean fuel and source of energy in power and aviation industries. It should be stated that hydrogen storage and transmission need careful safety considerations and hazard analysis which make the hydrogen utilization more challenging. Using hydrogen carrier has shown to be an alternating technique for hydrogen storage and transmission. Therefore, chemical conversion of hydrogen to ammonia can be considered as one of the safest and most commercially viable methods. To do so, a produced water treatment, PWT, unit will be designed using real data collected from typical oil wells in Texas or other states in the US. Based on the real compositional data from the collected samples, the water treatment and desalination unit, WTU, will be designed. The effluent hydrogen from WTU will be fed to a Water Splitting Unit, WSU, which will be designed based on a renewable source of energy for the electrolysis process. Water Splitting technology has been proven to produce green hydrogen. Green hydrogen, salts, and critical minerals will leave WSU, and the green hydrogen will be used in an Ammonia Production Plant, APP, to produce green ammonia. The Haber-Bosch process, also called Haber ammonia process, or synthetic ammonia process, will be simulated at high pressure and relatively low temperature. The lower the temperature and the higher the pressure used, the greater the proportion of ammonia yielded in the mixture. Techno-Economy analysis for the proposed process will be performed and the total costs per ton of ammonia will be determined. The results of this process design research can be used by petrochemical, refinery, and other chemical plants to take actions towards green technologies and sustainability in chemical technologies.