Economic Evaluation Of Coal-to-aromatics Technologies Based On Life Cycle Assessment(LCA)

Thetechnical performance,economic benefits and market prospects of the coal-to-aromatics route have a good development foundation and potential.The development and growth of China's coal-to-aromatics industry mainly depends on whether the industrialization of technology can be promoted as soon as possible,and whether several sets of large-scale industrialization projects of hundreds of thousands or even millions of tons can be built in a short time.This paper compares the processes of various coal-to-aromatics technologies.The ASPEN PLUS software was used to simulate the four emerging technologies of coal-to-aromatics,includingconversion of methyl bromide into aromatics,methanol to aromatics,alkylation of toluene with methanol,and synthesis gas to aromatics.And the main parameters of each process were analyzed.Optimized to obtain optimal process operating parameters,the resulting product meets national standards.Based on life cycle assessment(LCA),the technical and economic evaluations of the four processes were carried out.The economic performance of several coal-to-aromatics technologies was compared and evaluated through investment estimation and economic benefit analysis:The life cycle assessment method was used to analyze the whole life cycle process of coal-to-aromatics technologies,and the energy consumption and pollutant emissions of each technology were obtained,thus establishing life cycle inventories.Using the SETAC model to map the life cycle inventory data to five environmental impact types(non-renewable resource consumption,global warming,acidification,photochemical oxides and human toxicity),calculated the potential impact of various environmental impact types of four coal-to-aromatics technologies,then the "environmental impact load" indicator is used to reflect the total pressure on the environmental system of each technology.Finally,a comprehensive analysis of several coal-to-aromatics technologies from three aspects of technical performance,economic performance and environmental performance,it was concluded that alkylation of toluene with methanol to aromatics is the best process in the four processes.This provides a data reference for the industrialization of coal-to-aromatics in China.In addition,the evaluation system proposed in this paper can also be applied to the evaluation of other chemical systems,which has important practical guiding significance for chemical design and production.