title: Development of Economically Profitable and Environmentally Benign Alternatives for Low-cost Carbon Resources Valorization
Creators: name: Omidkar, Ali
Publisher: name: Graduate Studies
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: catalysis
subject: Non thermal plasma
subject: Techno economic assessment
subject: Life cycle assessment
subject: Fluid and Plasma

description: A global phenomenon of depletion is observed in high-quality light crude oil reserves, leading to a concomitant rise in their cost. Consequently, the future of petroleum utilization is anticipated to shift towards heavy oil resources, encompassing heavy, extra-heavy crude oils, and residues generated during the refining process. It is the motivation for the first research work about Techno-economic and life cycle assessment of bitumen upgrading using methane. As a result of the techno-economic analysis, the MAU process has the highest IRR and the shortest payback period for all scenarios. A comparison was also made between the proposed MAU process and other research studies. Results indicate that MAU with the total operating cost of (34.1 $/bbl. bitumen) and transportation cost of (1.1 $/bbl. Bitumen for 500 km pipeline transportation) has the best results. Based on the LCA results, using methane instead of hydrogen can decreases the CO2-eq/kg of fuel by 11%. However it can be proved that the methane upgrading of bitumen is highly feasible, the main problem remains. Bitumen is still a fossil-based fuel with high emissions. So in another research TEA and LCA of the waste cooking oil upgrading was carried out to assess the potential of methane upgrading for bio-based fuels. The production costs for the methane-assisted catalytic process are 0.365 $/kg renewable diesel and for hydrotreating and alkali-catalyzed process, the production costs are 0.574 $/kg renewable diesel and 0.513 $/kg biodiesel, respectively. The economic results have also been compared with other research and it was found the total production cost of the new process is minimal, however total capital investment is a bit high. The CO2-eq/MJ fuel is also decreased by 23% compared to commercial hydrotreating. The application of methane for upgrading fossil-based and bio-based fuels was proved, however, the pyrolysis of organic solid waste can be another application of methane as a hydrogen donor. In another research upgrading of waste cooking oil with natural gas was assessed. According to the economic evaluation, using natural gas significantly reduces the minimum selling price (MSP) of renewable diesel. In this study, $3.5/gal is the minimum selling price, which is 22% lower compared to similar plants in other literature reviews. A Monte Carlo simulation was also performed to investigate the uncertainty, and the results indicated that, with a probability of 50%, the net present value (NPV) is greater than the NPV calculated deterministically. Based on the results of the life cycle assessment, the newly proposed process emits 66% less amount of greenhouse gases than other commercial processes. The second part of this thesis delves into the experimental realm, introducing a novel non-thermal plasma-assisted catalytic process operating at ambient pressure and temperature for bio-oil upgrading with methane as the hydrogen donor. In this section based on the specific characteristics of rhodium and gallium nitride, Rh as active metal and GaN as support were selected. Based on the TEM-EDX results the size of nanoclusters mostly is on the interval of 1nm to 1.5 nm. The total acid number of feed decreased by 60% showing the synergic effect of catalyst and non-thermal plasma. The PONA analysis showed that saturation of olefins conversion to iso-paraffins has happened inside the plasma medium.