Energetic/economic penalty of CO2 emissions and application to coal-to-olefins projects in China

Abstract

Fossil fuels are major feedstock for industrial processes in the word. However, processing fossil fuels emits a large amount of CO2 giving a serious environmental impact. Conventional analysis of this impact is to quantify Global Warming Potential by using CO2 equivalent, but not on quantitatively energetic and economic metrics. This cannot measure a real cost of ecological goods and services, e.g. carbon sequestration, biogeochemical cycles, mineral and fossil resources. To address this issue, this paper introduces energetic and economic penalties. They are inspired by circulation of CO2 between industrial and ecological systems and defined as the additional energetic and economic costs for closing the CO2 loop by using ecological goods and services. These additional costs are considered as penalties. The carbon footprint and life cycle exergy/cost rate are applied to model the penalties. These models consider regional condition, for they include some regional ecological factors.Coal-to-olefins projects in different regions of China are used as case studies. Their energetic and economic penalties are calculated. Results show that olefins productions in Gansu, Ningxia, and Sinkiang suffer from the highest penalties. For economic penalties, they are higher than 2400RMB/t olefins. Productions in Inner Mongolia and Shanxi have the penalties in middle range, 1235RMB/t olefins and 1656RMB/t olefins. Productions in other regions pay much lower penalties, around 1000RMB/t olefins.