Abstract
The steel industry is among the highest carbon-emitting industrial sectors. Since the steel production process is already exhaustively optimized, alternative routes are sought in order to increase carbon efficiency and reduce these emissions. During steel production, three main carbon-containing off-gases are generated: blast furnace gas, coke oven gas and basic oxygen furnace gas. In the present work, the addition of renewable hydrogen by electrolysis to those steelworks off-gases is studied for the production of methane and methanol. Different case scenarios are investigated using AspenPlusTM flowsheet simulations, which differ on the end-product, the feedstock flowrates and on the production of power. Each case study is evaluated in terms of hydrogen and electrolysis requirements, carbon conversion, hydrogen consumption, and product yields. The findings of this study showed that the electrolysis requirements surpass the energy content of the steelwork’s feedstock. However, for the methanol synthesis cases, substantial improvements can be achieved if recycling a significant amount of the residual hydrogen.
Highlights
The iron and steel industry is among the industrial sectors with the highest production volumes, having indispensable end-products for modern society [1]
The European steel industry, in particular, is a world leader in steel production accounting for approximately 16% of the world production (8.5% belongs to the European Union countries), coming second only to China
This represents a boundary scenario for the utilization of the steelwork gases, which is restrictive in terms of hydrogen flows and electrolysis power requirements
Summary
The iron and steel industry is among the industrial sectors with the highest production volumes, having indispensable end-products for modern society [1]. The scope of this work is to study the integration of renewable hydrogen into steelworks off-gases for the efficient production of methane and methanol and to exploit the largest amounts of steelworks off-gases as carbon sources. This is a novelty in respect to past works [13,14] that exploit only limited amounts of these off-gases and focus mainly on the exploitation of the COG as feedstock for the synthesis reactors (as it is or mixed with other off-gases, due to its high hydrogen content).
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