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Highly effective hydrogenation of CO2 to methanol over Cu/ZnO/Al2O3 catalyst: A process economy & environmental aspects

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submitted on 2024-08-13, 09:19 and posted on 2024-08-13, 09:20 authored by Noor Yusuf, Fares Almomani

The hydrogenation of CO2 to methanol is one of the promising CO2 utilization routes in the industry that can contribute to emissions mitigation. In this work, improved operating conditions were reported for the sustainable catalytic hydrogenation of CO2 to methanol using Cu/ZnO/Al2O3 catalyst operated at 70 bar and 210 °C. The CO2 feedstock used for this process is pure CO2 produced from the cryogenic upgrading process of biogas or hydrocarbon industries and ready-to-use hydrogen purchased at 30 bar and 25 °C. The process was modeled and simulated using the commercial Aspen Plus software to produce methanol with a purity greater than 99% at 1 bar and 25 °C. The simulation results revealed that an adiabatic reactor operated with a CO2/H2 ratio of 1:7 produces methanol with a yield ≥99.84% and a CO2 conversion of 95.66%. Optimizing the heat exchanger network (HEN) achieved energy savings of 63% and reduced total direct and indirect CO2 emissions by 97.8%. The proposed methanol process with an annual production rate of 2.34 kt/yr is economically sound with a payback period of nine years if the maximum H2 price remains below $0.97/kg. Hence, producing or purchasing gray H2 from a steam reforming plant is the most viable economic source for the process.

Other Information

Published in: Fuel
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
See article on publisher's website: https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.fuel.2022.126027

Funding

Open Access funding provided by the Qatar National Library.

History

Language

  • English

Publisher

Elsevier

Publication Year

  • 2023

License statement

This Item is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Institution affiliated with

  • Hamad Bin Khalifa University
  • College of Science and Engineering - HBKU

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