Search

Despite the huge efforts devoted to the development of the electrochemical reduction of CO2 (ECO2R) in the past decade, still many challenges are present, hindering further approaches to industrial applications. This paper gives a perspective on these challenges from a Process Systems Engineering (PSE) standpoint, while at the same time highlighting the opportunities for advancements in the field in the European context. The challenges are connected with: the coupling of these processes with renewable electricity generation; the feedstock (in particular CO2); the processes itself; and the different products that can be obtained. PSE can determine the optimal interactions among the components of such systems, allowing educated decision making in designing the best process configurations under uncertainty and constrains. The opportunities, on the other hand, stem from a stronger collaboration between the PSE and the experimental communities, from the possibility of integrating ECO2R into existing industrial productions and from process-wide optimisation studies, encompassing the whole production cycle of the chemicals to exploit possible synergies., ChemE/Process Systems Engineering, Energy and Industry, Large Scale Energy Storage

Combining intermittent renewable electricity (IRE) with carbon capture and utilisation is urgently needed in the chemical sector. In this context, microbial electrosynthesis (MES) has gained attention. It can electrochemically produce hexanoic acid, a value-added chemical, from CO2. However, there is a lack of understanding regarding how the intermittency of renewable electricity could impact the design of a MES plant. We studied this using Aspen Plus models. A MES plant that was powered by constant grid electricity could operate from 100% down to 70% of its nominal capacity, at which point the heat exchangers and the internal geometrical design of the distillation towers became bottlenecks. The levelised production cost of hexanoic acid (LPCC6A) was estimated at 4.0 €/kg. Switching to IRE supply increased LPCC6A to 5.3 €/kg (for wind electricity) and 4.7 €/kg (for hybrid renewable electricity). A battery energy storage system (BESS) was deployed. The lowest LPCC6A was found at a BESS installation of 29 GJ/h for wind electricity (5.1 €/kg) and at 12 GJ/h for hybrid renewable electricity (4.7 €/kg). In both situations, the volume flexibility of the MES plant was not improved. At the investigated market and operating conditions, coupling IRE to the MES plant was economically infeasible., Energy and Industry, BT/Bioprocess Engineering, ChemE/Chemical Engineering

An educational workshop for developing Process Systems Engineering (PSE) courses will be held during ESCAPE-33, following the model workshop that was run during the CAPE Forum 2022 held at the University of Twente, in the Netherlands. This 3-hour workshop distributes the participants into four teams working together to develop the outline of a course on a novel application area in PSE motivated by a selected plenary or keynote talk at the conference, with each team led by authors of this contribution. This paper provides an overview of the approach used in the workshop for the effective development of a PSE course.

An educational workshop for developing Process Systems Engineering (PSE) courses will be held during ESCAPE-33, following the model workshop that was run during the CAPE Forum 2022 held at the University of Twente, in the Netherlands. This 3-hour workshop distributes the participants into four teams working together to develop the outline of a course on a novel application area in PSE motivated by a selected plenary or keynote talk at the conference, with each team led by authors of this contribution. This paper provides an overview of the approach used in the workshop for the effective development of a PSE course., Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public., ChemE/Product and Process Engineering, Energy and Industry, ChemE/Delft Ingenious Design

Using alternative carbon sources (ACS) to produce downstream derivatives (DDs) is a promising option for defossilising the chemical industry. However, the potential consequences of using ACS in interconnected petrochemical clusters are generally overlooked. This paper aims to develop a methodological approach for systematically analysing defossilisation impacts at the value chain level. For this, a single value chain for producing methyl-tert-butyl-ether (MTBE) was used as a case study. The individual components of the value chain were modelled in Aspen Plus v12. Both ACS- and fossil-based value chains were compared in terms of (i) changes in the structure of the value chain and (ii) the magnitude of the impacts. The results show that the defossilisation of a single value chain causes additional impacts at the cluster level., Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public., Energy and Industry

Electrochemical reduction of CO2 (CO2ER) is an emerging technology with the potential to limit the use of fossil-based feedstocks in the petrochemical industry by converting CO2 and renewable electricity into useful products such as syngas. Its successful deployment will depend not only on the technology's performance but also on its integration into the supply chain. In this work, a facility location model is used to gain insights regarding the capacity of CO2ER plants that produce syngas and the implications for the central/decentral placement of these CO2-based syngas plants. Different optimal configurations are examined in the model by changing the syngas transport costs. In this exploratory case, the results indicate that centralization is only an option when the syngas and CO2 transport costs are similar. When syngas transport is more expensive, decentralizing CO2-based syngas plants in the supply chain appears more feasible., Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public., Energie and Industrie, ChemE/Chemical Engineering

Due to the heavy dependence on fossil-fuels as raw materials, the defossilization of feedstocks in the petrochemical industry represents a challenge. A large number of possible process routes that use alternative carbon sources (ACS) like CO2, biomass, and waste are being developed for the feedstock replacement. For instance, to produce ethylene, more than 40 ACS process routes were identified. These multiple options make the selection of the promising process route a complex task. By replacing feedstocks, a process can change significantly and the impacts related to these changes in a highly interconnected industrial cluster can create cascading effects due to system interdependencies. This work aims to understand the cascading impacts in carbon flows and prices of implementing an ACS production process in an ethylene cluster. The results show that PVC will be the highest impacted and defossilizing one value-chain can have cascading effect on other value-chains as observed for PET., Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public., Energy and Industry

Reaching our climate goals will require urgent advancements in the development of fossil-free technologies. Solid-oxide electrolysis (SOE) at high-temperature is a promising candidate for combining CO₂ utilization and renewable electricity use. Explorative techno-economic analyses are being performed to understand the full plant design requirements for integrated SOE systems. However, there is still a lack of understanding of the potential impact that the pre-treatment of CO₂ will have on the overall design and economics of a SOE-based system. To address this knowledge gap, as a first step, the process model of the pre-treatment units needed to purify CO₂ from a bioethanol plant is developed in Aspen Plus in the current work. Based on the preliminary results of this paper, the equipment costs mainly stem from the units related to the removal of sulfur (~65%) and alcohols (~32%). The energy costs are almost entirely related to the cryogenic distillation step required for the removal of non-condensable gases (~96%)., Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public., Energy and Industry

The production of base chemicals by electrochemical conversion of captured CO2 has the potential to close the carbon cycle, thereby contributing to a future energy transition. With the feasibility of low-temperature electrochemical CO2 conversion demonstrated at lab scale, research is shifting toward optimizing electrolyser design and operation for industrial applications, with target values based on techno-economic analysis. However, current techno-economic analyses often neglect experimentally reported interdependencies of key performance variables such as the current density, the faradaic efficiency, and the conversion. Aiming to understand the impact of these interdependencies on the economic outlook, we develop a model capturing mass transfer effects over the channel length for an alkaline, membrane electrolyser. Coupling the channel scale with the higher level process scale and embedding this multiscale model in an economic framework allows us to analyze the economic trade-off between the performance variables. Our analysis shows that the derived target values for the performance variables strongly depend on the interdependencies described in the channel scale model. Our analysis also suggests that economically optimal current densities can be as low as half of the previously reported benchmarks. More generally, our work highlights the need to move toward multiscale models, especially in the field of CO2 electrolysis, to effectively elucidate current bottlenecks in the quest toward economically compelling system designs., ChemE/Product and Process Engineering, Energie and Industrie

Reversible solid oxide cells (rSOC) can convert excess electricity to valuable fuels in electrolysis cell mode (SOEC) and reverse the reaction in fuel cell mode (SOFC). In this work, a five – cell rSOC short stack, integrating fuel electrode (Ni-YSZ) supported solid oxide cells (Ni-YSZ || YSZ | CGO || LSC-CGO) with an active area of 100 cm2, is tested for cyclic durability. The fuel electrode gases of H2/N2:50/50 and H2/H2O:20/80 in SOFC and SOEC mode, respectively, are used during the 35 reversible operations. The voltage degradation of the rSOC is 1.64% kh−1 and 0.65% kh−1 in SOFC and SOEC mode, respectively, with fuel and steam utilisation of 52%. The post-cycle steady-state SOEC degradation of 0.74% kh−1 suggests improved lifetime during rSOC conditions. The distribution of relaxation times (DRT) analysis suggests charge transfer through the fuel electrode is responsible for the observed degradation.

Reversible solid oxide cells (rSOC) can convert excess electricity to valuable fuels in electrolysis cell mode (SOEC) and reverse the reaction in fuel cell mode (SOFC). In this work, a five – cell rSOC short stack, integrating fuel electrode (Ni-YSZ) supported solid oxide cells (Ni-YSZ || YSZ | CGO || LSC-CGO) with an active area of 100 cm2, is tested for cyclic durability. The fuel electrode gases of H2/N2:50/50 and H2/H2O:20/80 in SOFC and SOEC mode, respectively, are used during the 35 reversible operations. The voltage degradation of the rSOC is 1.64 % kh-1 and 0.65 % kh-1 in SOFC and SOEC mode, respectively, with fuel and steam utilisation of 52%. The post-cycle steady-state SOEC degradation of 0.74 % kh-1 suggests improved lifetime during rSOC conditions. The Distribution of Relaxation Times (DRT) analysis suggests charge transfer through the fuel electrode is responsible for the observed degradation.