EPC'S GUEST AUTHOR SERIES:
Richard Charlesworth, Executive Director - Oil, Midstream, Downstream & Chemicals, IHS Markit has shared with us his key takeaways from our last edition of ME-TECH, the Middle East Technology Forum for Refining & Petrochemicals
Last month I had the honour to present at ME-TECH 2022 in Dubai, back in-person after the Covid-enforced virtual event the year before. My opening presentation was entitled, “The Outlook for Refining and Petrochemicals: How do you solve a problem like carbon?”. Whilst delegates were interested in the outlook, the problem of carbon emissions was high on everyone’s agenda given the top-down corporate targets of almost every major oil and refining company.
In just the last 20 years, the problem has become much worse. The IEA estimates CO2 emissions from industries has increased from just over 5000 Gt/year in 2000 to over 8000 Gt/year in 2020. Cement, steel, and chemicals are most carbon-intensive industries. Emissions come from several resources: Scope 1 from Assets; Scope 2 from Electricity / Steam bought from 3rd party and consumed by asset and Scope 3 all other emissions in the value chain of an asset.
Net zero is already a top corporate strategy, but targets range widely in scope, ambition and definition. These are all top-down targets and many of our clients are struggling to match the targets from the bottom up.
So how do you solve a problem like carbon?
Well, there are many solutions, from big to small.
There are multiple opportunities to manage carbon content and emissions from upstream down to refined and petrochemical products. Opportunities upstream come from “greener” feedstocks and pyrolysis oil and other products from recycling plastic waste. Within the refinery/petrochemical complex there is renewables and electrification, hydrogen, CO2 use or sequestration. Products would be lower carbon and more sustainable. Deeper chemical integration is also a decarbonization strategy.
CO2 emissions need to be captured. There are multiple sectors, multiple sources, multiple technologies and treatment. However, the decreasing CO2 concentrations lead to increasing cost. How much? In my presentation I showed three examples of carbon capture solutions for big to small concentrations, namely Solvent Absorption, Rapid Temperature Swing Adsorption and Direct CO2 capture with Caustic Absorber. S&P Global’s Process Economics Program (PEP) has used engineering level flowsheet models to build OPEX and CAPEX assessments from the bottom-up and identify the challenges. The capture costs increase from $50-$300/ton as concentration decreases and CAPEX is up to 1500 $/ton captured!
Carbon capture for blue hydrogen has received a lot of intention, especially in the Middle East. From similar studies the addition of carbon capture substantially increases the CAPEX and OPEX by 75% and 40% especially, even if only 60% carbon is captured.
Ethylene production is one of the industry’s largest CO2 emitters. Technologies are under development with comparable economics to commercial technology with lower emissions. Eco Catalyst are developing ethylene production by high selectivity oxidative dehydrogenation (ODH) of ethane with lower OPEX and CAPEX than traditional steam crackers. Coolbrook’s Roto Dynamic Reactor (RDR) replaces a conventional furnace for naphtha cracking with the energy source as a rotor-stator combination (>20,000 rpm) with very rapid kinetic energy transfer and short residence times providing up to 30% lower energy consumption and a 75% reduction in CO2 emission if renewable electricity is used. BASF are developing electric furnaces for crackers with a 90% reduction in CO2 emission if renewable electricity is used.
These are just a handful of examples. So how do refinery and petrochemical operators get an understanding of the impact and cost of the options for their assets? For S&P Global’s clients’ decarbonizing projects and new capital projects we use our proprietary Refinery & Petrochemical Integrator & Decarbonizer (RAPID) cloud-based modelling tool. This allows a client to instantly model their facility with commercial and emerging technologies to understand the “decarbonization arc” of CAPEX required to achieve the CO2e reduction targets.
So is the problem solved? Perhaps. But it’s going to be expensive!
Find Richard Charlesworth's presentation here:
EPC is a technical oil and gas consultancy with offices in Dubai, London, Sofia and Kuala Lumpur, as well as organisers of leading conferences worldwide including ME-TECH – the premier technical downstream event in the region. ME-TECH 2023 will take place from 16-18 May 2023 in Dubai. For more information, please visit europetro.com/metech