The Changing Landscape of Hydrocarbon Feedstocks for Chemical Production Implications for Catalysis: Proceedings of a Workshop (2016) / Chapter Skim
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5 Environmental Impacts
5 Environmental Impacts
Pages 71-78
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Servey Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Kansas; and Klaus Harth, vice president for environmental catalysis research at Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik (BASF)
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The best new technologies, then, will be ones that not only offer a benefit in terms of environmental impacts and operating costs, but also make use of existing infrastructure or reduce the cost of transitioning to a new infrastructure. ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS ON ENERGY-MOBILITY CHEMICALS The shale gas revolution, said Mesters, has already enabled the United States to reduce its carbon emission by replacing coal with methane, since coal burning emits nearly twice the amount of carbon dioxide per unit of energy produced compared with burning natural gas to carbon dioxide and water (see Table 5-1)
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The indirect route via syngas or using alternative oxidants that first produce methyl-X compounds requires multiple chemical reactions in series, which drives up capital costs. CHANGING THE SYSTEM OF CHEMICAL MANUFACTURING PROCESSES Chemical manufacturing is a systems-based operation, said Allen, and as the industry and policy makers begin to assess how the industry's environmental footprint will change with the transformations this workshop has discussed, it is important to do so from a systems perspective.
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It can be a particularly powerful tool to use when looking at environmental impacts because it can account for the follow-on benefits that can result when a new chemical material enables changes outside of the chemical industry that have a positive environmental impact. For example, a new lightweight but strong material could have no net effect on chemical industry emissions, but it could make vehicles more energy efficient and reduce overall emissions significantly.
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QUANTITATIVE SUSTAINABILITY-GUIDED PROCESS DESIGN The U.S. chemical industry uses approximately 5 billion British thermal units (BTUs)
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The analysis revealed that without such changes, the quantitative overall environmental impacts on air quality, water quality, and greenhouse gas emissions would be similar for both processes and lie within the uncertainties of such predictions. In the second example, he and his collaborators compared terephthalic acid produced in a spray reactor process with the conventional process.
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Two-thirds of the carbon footprint of the hydrogenation processes, he said, comes from generating hydrogen, and the cracking processes are endothermic, so discounting those two curves by the things that catalysis cannot change suggests, in his opinion, that the industry has figured out the optimal inefficiency for a wide variety of processes across the chemical industry that is independent of feedstock variations, price fluctuations, inversion of processes, and any other factors. Subramaniam said that where catalysis can change that equilibrium is by maximizing carbon atom efficiency.
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From page 78... ...
electricity generation while emitting carbon dioxide equivalent to the emissions of approximately 1 million cars per year during the environmental panel open discussion. He added, and Helling agreed, that flaring was a better option than simply venting methane given that methane is approximately 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, but the better option still would be to make something from that natural gas.
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