Energy and Exergy Optimization of Hydrocarbon Recovery (HCR) Plant Considering Potential Environmental Impact and Economics

Process energy integration and continuous improvement of process technology are one of the increasing issues to ensure profitability of chemical productions. The energy conservation, process economics and environmental aspects are integrated at the early stage of the process development, the easier and less expensive to improve the process design. In this work different distillation process design alternatives have been considered with respect to evaluations of process economics and potential environmental impacts. The concept of exergy distribution has also been used as a tool to identify exergy loss profiles in each distillation unit. A multi-criteria decision making technique such as (Analytic Hierarchy Process) AHP is applied for ranking the alternatives. This method reveals that the heat pump distillation unit which has the highest score of 52 % is the best alternative when compare with the base case. In terms of the effluent streams, the base case has a less potential environmental impact (PEI) compared to heat pump. The lower total PEI/kg (7.45E-01) of the base case illustrates that the material utilization efficiency of the base case is better than that of the heat pump which PEI/kg is 8.14E-01.

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