Process simulation, life cycle assessment, and techno-economic analysis

The following content is copied from this reference (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ccst.2022.100052):

“The majority of work concerning the ICCC process focused on the development of DFMs. Only a few works included process simulation, life cycle assessment, and techno-economic analysis. For example, Shao et al. (Shao et al., 2021a) conducted an economic evaluation and demonstrated that the ICCC-RWGS strategy would generate an additional profit of $9.38 million per year compared to the combination of individual CaL and RWGS processes to address around 100,000 t/year of CO₂ emission in an ethylene plant with a yearly operating time of 8,000 h/year. Sun et al. (Sun, S. et al., 2021a) performed the techno-economic analysis of the ICCC-RWGS process. They reported that the cost of CO generating is $292/ton for the ICCC-RWGS using CaO alone, which is much lower than that of a single RWGS process ($447/ton), including conventional CaL process for CO₂ capture, CO₂ compression and transportation, RWGS, and the standard syngas purification process. The costs of DFMs used for the ICCC process may also significantly affect the practical applications. Yet the costs for the large-scale preparation of DFMs are seldom discussed in open literature. The used active metals, sorbent materials, and preparation methods etc. need to be considered economically for DFMs development. Among the widely investigated metals, Ni being the cheapest one ($0.028 USD/g) with reasonable activity comparing to the noble metals, i.e., Ru ($19.9 USD/g) and Rh ($498.3 USD/g) (Daily Metal Prices, 2022). However, it is more sensitive to O₂, which is widely presented in CO₂ containing streams, and may loss the conversion activity especially at low operation temperatures (Arellano-Treviño et al., 2019a; Arellano-Treviño et al., 2019b) as discussed earlier. Thus it remains a big challenge for the developing of cost-effective DFMs. Currently, process simulation, life cycle assessment, and techno-economic analysis are limited for the ICCC, which are important for the industrial applications of the ICCC process in the future.”