Abstract
BackgroundThe chemical process industry, mainly the production of organic and inorganic base chemicals, has a significantly high demand for electrical and thermal energy. This demand is constant in time and quantity due to mostly continuous production. On the contrary, the dependency of electricity supply in Germany on volatile wind and solar power increases. To use this power effectively, we propose the direct utilization of it in the chemical process industry.MethodsTo analyze the potential of the utilization of renewably generated power in the chemical process industry, the energy supply and demand has to be quantified. Therefore, methods are developed to calculate possible excess energies from the volatile renewable sources wind and sun. Furthermore, through a literature review, important production processes of the German chemical industry are characterized.ResultsThe developed methods lead to time series of the future power generation by wind turbines and photovoltaic systems with a high temporal resolution. The overall gross energy consumption and the full load hours per year show a good consistency with numbers extracted from literature. Additionally, the specific energy consumption per ton product and the yearly production volume are chosen as process parameters to evaluate the potential.ConclusionsA comparison between the calculated excess energy and the energy consumption for specific chemical products leads to the conclusion that the German chemical industry can function as energy sink for renewably generated power in the future. As a consequence, strategies have to be developed to make production processes more flexible in their operation.
Highlights
The chemical process industry, mainly the production of organic and inorganic base chemicals, has a significantly high demand for electrical and thermal energy
After presenting a method to quantify possible excess energies, in the following part of this article, we describe the characterization of production processes within the German chemical industry
Quantification of excess energy Performing the calculation of wind power generation for the year 2020 under the above-defined assumptions led to a gross onshore power generation of 77.8 TWh and 2,000 full load hours for the year 2020
Summary
The chemical process industry, mainly the production of organic and inorganic base chemicals, has a significantly high demand for electrical and thermal energy. After the political decision to end power generation by nuclear power stations until the year 2022 in Germany [1], agreements to decrease CO2 emissions [2], and increasing public awareness to decrease the dependency on fossil resources [3], the utilization of renewable sources increases constantly. Due to the possibility that biomass can be utilized by directly burning it solely or by co-firing it in fossil power stations, high full load hours per year can be reached [5] This renewable electricity generation is mostly constant in time and projectable. The utilization of wind and solar energy is highly dependent on local weather conditions and not predictable and is volatile This leads to temporal mismatches between the electricity supply and demand in Germany.
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