Browsing by Author "Navarro Torres, Felipe"

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    Producción de metanol a partir de hidrógeno verde en la zona Austral utilizando Aspen Plus.
    (Universidad de Concepción, 2023) Navarro Torres, Felipe; Márquez Romegialli, Fernando; Carrasco Moraga, Juan Carlos
    Chile has developed an ambitious national strategy promoting the use and production of green hydrogen on a large scale to meet the carbon neutrality goals set for the year 2050. Among the main uses of green hydrogen is the production of chemical compounds such as ammonia and methanol. Methanol stands out for its use in the chemical industry to produce compounds such as formaldehyde. It is also used in construction materials, solvents, medical equipment, pharmaceutical compounds, wind turbine manufacturing, among others. In recent times, it has been used as fuel in ships and vehicles, since its emission of particulate matter is almost nil. In the context of the energy transition and the establishment of a sustained demand for green hydrogen, this thesis project seeks to study and analyze the technical and economic aspects of green methanol production in a plant located in the southern area of Chile, Magallanes. The main characteristics of the green methanol synthesis process were identified from the bibliographic study and used to simulate the process, assuming that the raw materials, such as green hydrogen and carbon dioxide, are obtained from suppliers. The plant was sized taking as reference the production of green hydrogen based on a renewable electricity supply obtained from a wind farm with a capacity of 30 MW, obtaining as feed to the methanol synthesis process 4,480 t/year green H2 and 32,597 t/year CO2, giving as final production 22,265 t/year green CH3OH with a purity of 97.3%. A one-pass conversion of 14% and an overall conversion of 93% was obtained. In addition, it was determined that 0.201 tons of green hydrogen, 1.464 tons of carbon dioxide, 3.60 m3 of cooling water and 0.291 MWh of renewable electricity are required to produce 1 ton of green methanol in this plant. From the economic analysis, based on Towler and Aspen Economics methodologies for plant costing, the feasibility of the project was analyzed for 5 different scenarios: Case 1) pessimistic where the green hydrogen price is 5,500 USD/t; Case 2) conservative where the green hydrogen price is 3,000 USD/t; Case 3) optimistic where the green hydrogen price is 2,000 USD/t; Case 4) Magallanes 2030 projection where the green hydrogen price is 1,300 USD/t; Case 5) Magallanes 2050 projection where the green hydrogen price is 1,000 USD/t. It was concluded that the economic viability of the project depends mainly on the cost of green H2, only being competitive for Case 4) and 5). This is reflected in the sales prices of the green methanol obtained for the mentioned cases. If the project will consider the production of green H2 in the process, the sensitivity analysis varying the cost of renewable electricity would yield very different values from those obtained in this work, since this parameter would represent the highest cost of the process and would have a significant impact on the final price of methanol. This, added to the fact that carbon credits could increase the price of conventional methanol, generating a competitive scenario for green methanol.
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