Carbon: Feeling the Pinch Raymond Tan and Dominic Foo explain how pinch analysis techniques can be used to optimise decarbonisation techniques

摘要

CLIMATE change has emerged as a major environmental issue for the international community.According to a recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,net global emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases(GHGs)need to be cut to zero by mid-century in order to safely stabilise global warming to about 1.5°C by 2100.Such reductions can only be achieved by large-scale deployment of decarbonisation techniques,including supply-and demand-side energy efficiency enhancement,fuel switching,increased use of renew-ables and nuclear energy,and commercialisation of carbon capture,storage and utilisation(CCUS)technologies.Given the potentially difficult choices that need to be made in large-scale decarbonisation programmes,policy makers can benefit from techniques to estimate,visualise and communicate how deep GHG emissions cuts can be achieved.Within the chemical engineering community,we now have some established tools that can be used for planning the above decarbonisation techniques.This includes the various forms of process integration techniques(including pinch analysis and mathematical optimisation),which were originally developed in the 1970s for minimising energy requirements in industrial plants.The methodology has since been extended to address various problems involving minimisation of resource use and waste generation.One of the more recently-developed branches of process integration is carbon emission pinch analysis(CEPA),which determines optimal allocation of energy in carbon-constrained systems.This article looks at some of the established CEPA techniques.