(564g) Systematic Design of Carbon Constrained Industrial Parks

Natural gas, the cleanest fossil fuel, is an vital resource for the oil and gas industry as it is used both as raw material and an energy source. It is considered the transition fuel to a carbon free economy and is key material for many economies. Different routes exist to monetize natural gas to value added products and each route comes with corresponding carbon footprint and cost. Effective natural gas monetization is of increasing importance especially with the global consensus on emission reduction and visions towards carbon free economies. It poses challenges the industry to adhere to emission reduction targets, while maintaining profitability. Most emissions due natural gas stem for stationary industrial emissions such as stacks, gas turbine exhausts and byproducts (waste) from processing. The stationary nature of the emissions however, gives an advantage to capture large amounts of emissions within close proximity as oppose to scattered mobile emission e.g. transportation emissions. Thus, monetization decisions of natural gas with carbon reduction were investigated. The method that explores natural gas usage options either as conversion to value added products such as liquefied natural gas (LNG), Gas-to-Liquid (GTL), Methanol, etc or use as fuel in power plant under emission targets. The industrial city was taken as a system and modeled through balances and constraints, which were optimized applying deterministic solvers. The systematic, optimization-based approach to simultaneously determined natural gas monetization and carbon dioxide management through carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) as well as renewable energy strategies. It integrates energy in both heat and power between different processing plants within the industrial city boundary using a central utility system. The holistic method compared the different natural gas value added products routes from economics (capital and operating costs) with its carbon dioxide emissions that were either eliminated through the use of renewable energy or by converting carbon dioxide in the CCUS network. The approach could determine the investment needed, the capacity, allocation and pipeline network design of the materials exchanged. This framework enables the assessment of different climate reduction policies, which is a powerful tool for regulators and industrial cities designers. Several case studies were solved that considered an existing industrial city that needed to meet emission requirement and the design of a new grass-root city with limited flow of natural gas and an imposed emission target.