Process Modelling and Simulation of Enhanced Methanol Production with the Parallel Design Configuration between Gasification and Reforming Technologies with the control on Green House Gas Emissions.

Recently, the methanol production has received a lot of attraction in the process industries due to its wide applications in the synthesis of many commercial chemicals and fuels. Most of the methanol synthesis processes suffers from higher water consumption, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and lower yields. The aim of this study is to develop a novel energy efficient and economic viable process that may not only increase the methanol production capacity but also offers the less energy requirements with better process economics. Most of the conventional methanol production processes utilizes the methane reforming technologies to get the higher HCR (hydrogen to carbon) ratio in the synthesis gas. However, the depletion in the natural gas resources is pushing the research towards the development of non-conventional technologies with more fuel flexibilities. Gasification technologies on the other hand demonstrated extensive applications in the synthesis gas production from wide variety of feedstocks ranging from solid to liquid fuels even the municipal and organic waste. However, the syngas from the gasification process usually yields low heating value synthesis gas with lower HCR ratio, which is detrimental to the methanol production facilities. The integration of gasification and reforming technologies not only reserves a potential to utilize relatively less expensive energy sources but also helps in increasing both the synthesis gas and H2 production. In this project, three standalone state of the art processes namely gasification, methane reforming & methanol synthesis processes will be developed in Aspen Plus along with their validation based on industrial data. Furthermore, the integration of these three process models will provide the framework of novel design for methanol production followed by the techno economic analysis to analyse the process performance and economics. Some of the key technical and economic process indicators will also be evaluated and compared for the detailed analysis and validation of the novel model. The key idea of this project is to sequentially integrate the gasification and reforming technologies in the parallel design configuration to enhance the heating value of the resulting syngas for methanol production. To achieve this aim, number of case studies will be developed and compared in terms of overall process performance and economics. Base case designs will represents the conventional coal to methanol (CTM) process and natural gas to methanol (NGTM) processes. The new cases will represent the sequential integration designs between gasification and reforming technologies for enhanced methanol production. Finally, the results from all the case studies will be compared to analyse the best design in terms of process performance, economics and from the environmental quality control perspectives.