Life-cycle Carbon Footprint Assessment and Techno-economic Analysis of Integrated Energy Production Unit

The Integrated Energy Production Unit (IEPU) couples green hydrogen production with carbon capture technology of coal-fired power plants to produce green fuels that are convenient for storage and transportation. IEPU is promising in facilitating renewable energy consumption, carbon utilization, and hydrogen storage and transportation. To quantitatively evaluate the technical and economic feasibility and decarbonization potential of IEPU, this paper constructs a simulation model of the IEPU process flow, simulates key processes such as wind power hydrogen production, methanol synthesis, and compression and purification, establishes a full lifecycle inventory of multiple energy and material flows, conducts carbon footprint evaluation, and identifies feasible paths for further carbon reduction. Sensitivity analysis is conducted in terms of technical parameters such as energy efficiency and current density, and economic parameters such as wind power prices and carbon taxes, to evaluate the economic feasibility of IEPU under different technical and economic backgrounds and explore the profitability conditions of IEPU. The carbon footprint evaluation shows that the full lifecycle net carbon reduction of a 390 kilotons/year green methanol production unit is 58.8 kilotons/year. Technical and economic evaluation shows that, under a favorable technical and economic background, the wind power price of 0.21RMB/(kW.h) allows the cost of the proposed IEPU based green methanol production to be comparable to that of traditional plants. ©2024 Chin.Soc.for Elec.Eng.