(548t) Anhydrous Bio-Ethanol Production: Life Cycle Analysis of Distillation and Dehydration Steps

Bio-ethanol production is a rapidly growing market due to the possible uses of the anhydrous product in energy generation. This production however, is weighed down by the energetic demands and the environmental effects of the separation and dehydration steps needed to deliver fuel-grade bio-ethanol.

This paper examines the distillation and dehydration steps of a bio-ethanol production plant complementing a sugar mill. The distillation step is optimized by performing rigorous energy analysis and heat integration on the process utilizing the resources made available by the sugar mill, while pervaporation is used in the dehydration step. The user-defined module is integrated in commercial process simulators to study the environmental and energetic impact of different process configurations. Different schemes meeting equivalent performance standards in terms of purity and recovery are examined in this paper.

Particular attention is given to energetic demands as comparison metrics. Life Cycle Analysis of the optimum process configuration is further used to identify critical sources of environmental impact.