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The contribution of renewable energy sources to the power generation portfolio has been increasing in recent years, offering new opportunities for chemical industry electrification and decarbonization. However, renewables often face challenges that may affect their optimal utilization. Wind and solar power generation are highly variable over time, which can lead to a mismatch between electricity output and demand. In this work, we aim to identify optimal ways of more efficiently using wind-generated power through the direct electrification of chemical manufacturing, specifically the replacement of fossil-based thermal heating with electricity-based heating. We implement a multiperiod, multiobjective optimization model formulated as a mixed-integer linear program (MILP). Profit and CO2-equivalent emissions are used as competing objectives in an effort to study the impact of variable renewable energy generation and how it can enable the shift toward lower carbon emissions in chemical manufacturing. The model’s capabilities are illustrated using a process network structure involving chemical processes that can use natural gas liquids as raw materials and a wind farm for power generation. The results demonstrate that the use of renewable electricity is impactful and, through thermal electrification, provides significant CO2emissions reduction. The coproduction and sale of chemicals and renewable electricity are shown to further accelerate the adoption of process electrification, emphasizing the importance of sector coupling (manufacturing–power grid) in promoting decarbonization. As emission limits become stricter, a transition point is identified beyond which thermal electrification alone is insufficient to meet the emissions target, and reductions in production and/or changing the product mix is necessary to maintain an optimal profit.

A gridded inventory for emissions of methane, ethane, propane, and butanes from oil and gas sources in the Barnett Shale production region has been developed. This inventory extends previous spatially resolved inventories of emissions by characterizing the overall variability in emission magnitudes and the composition of emissions at an hourly time resolution. The inventory is divided into continuous and intermittent emission sources. Sources are defined as continuous if hourly averaged emissions are greater than zero in every hour; otherwise, they are classified as intermittent. In the Barnett Shale, intermittent sources accounted for 14–30% of the mean emissions for methane and 10–34% for ethane, leading to spatial and temporal variability in the location of hourly emissions. The combined variability due to intermittent sources and variability in emission factors can lead to wide confidence intervals in the magnitude and composition of time and location-specific emission inventories; therefore, including temporal and spatial variability in emission inventories is important when reconciling inventories and observations. Comparisons of individual aircraft measurement flights conducted in the Barnett Shale region versus the estimated emission rates for each flight from the emission inventory indicate agreement within the expected variability of the emission inventory for all flights for methane and for all but one flight for ethane.