Economic, environment, and social impacts of two routes of methanol production via sustainability evaluator

Abstract

Methanol is a clean energy resource as it can be produced from the waste, natural gas, landfill gas, and many more. Nowadays, methanol is one of the primary feedstocks for many chemical productions. Therefore, the production of methanol is now getting demanded around the world. However, one must consider the sustainability of methanol production. Sustainability contemplates three significant impacts of the process that are economic (EI), environment (ENVI), and social (SCI). Hence, this paper aims to evaluate the sustainability of methanol processing plants using Sustainability Evaluator (SE) in conjunction with Aspen HYSYS. Two routes were chosen to simulate the methanol plants (i) via Syngas (ii) and natural gas. NRTL and Peng Robinson were used as thermodynamic packages to ensure a good description of a nonideal system. The results generated from HYSYS, such as purity, production yield, and the amount of energy consumed, were extracted to be fed into the SE. Methanol via natural gas has a higher purity, which was 99.2% compared to methanol via Syngas that was only 94.1%. The SUI of the methanol production via syngas and methanol production via natural gas were found to be 0.34 and 0.15, respectively. Therefore, the overall sustainability index has shown that the methanol plant via natural gas that simulated in this project via HYSYS was more sustainable.