Assessment of power generation from natural gas and biomass to enhance environmental sustainability of a polyol ether production process for rigid foam polyurethane synthesis

摘要

Polyol ether production process can result in emission of extremelyn hazardous substances besides it requires high energy demand which cann also cause environmental impacts. This paper presents an exergy-aidedn life cycle assessment (LCA) to pinpoint avoidable key causes of then environmental unsustainability in the period of clean energy transition,n and enhance the sustainability as much as achievable. The powern generation system is pinpointed as the mitigable key source of then unsustainability of the polyol ether production under the strict processn constraints imposed by the energy transition. Then, a set of possiblen scenarios supported by Monte Carlo simulations are defined, resulting inn reducing environmental impacts from 7.17 to 7.11 MJ equivalent ofn nonrenewable energy sources according to the Cumulative Exergy Demand orn from the dimensionless normalized results of 3.43E-04 to 2.98E-04n according to ReCiPe. Moreover, LCA is advantageous to quantify preciselyn environmental impacts of each chemical component, showing that CO2 hasn much more adverse impacts on human health than the hazardous substances.n Additionally, LCA reveals that natural gas can even be less sustainablen than residual fuel oil in terms of freshwater ecotoxicity (75%), marinen ecotoxicity (51%), terrestrial acidification (27%), human toxicityn (43%), particulate matter formation (18%), and fossil depletion (64%)n impacts. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.