Published October 2024
Ethylene is the largest-volume basic petrochemical. It is produced primarily by steam cracking of hydrocarbons (naphtha, gasoil, ethane, and liquefied petroleum gas [LPG]) and is utilized to produce a spectrum of chemical intermediates. Ethylene consumption has been increasingly driven by its demand in emerging countries and consumption has increased at an average rate of approximately 4% per year over the past decade.
Ethylene production is one of the three largest CO2 emitters in the chemical industry; the other two are propylene and ammonia. Conventional cracking generates about 1-1.8 metric tons of CO2 for every metric ton of ethylene produced. Globally, that amounts to more than 260 MMt of CO2 emissions per year
Therefore, there is significant interest in decarbonization of ethylene production. One route is electrification of the cracking process, which has the potential to reduce emissions by up to 95%, if green electricity is used.
It is a promising technology and companies like Linde/BASF/SABIC; Shell/Dow; LyondellBasell/Chevron Phillips/Technip Energies; Coolbrook/ABB; and Borealis/BP/Total Energies/Repsol, among others, are competing to demonstrate and commercialize the electric cracker concept.
But there is a catch — the enormous amount of green electricity required. For a 1.5-MMt/y ethane cracker, the electricity required after electrification will exceed 1,000 MW, round the clock.
This report provides a comparison between three possible sources of green electricity to decarbonize ethylene production through the electrification of naphtha cracking. The three sources analyzed are:
1.Green electricity from grid
2.Green electricity generated in-house using the NET Power cycle
3.Green electricity generated in-house by a combined-cycle gas turbine.
The analysis is based on the production of 1 MMt/y of polymer-grade ethylene. Wide-range naphtha (WRN) is the feed, and all three routes employ a front-end depropanizer configuration. Although the quantitative results will differ for other feeds/configurations, directionally, the analysis of relative merits/demerits will still be valid.
The technical and economic snapshot is provided for the first quarter of 2024, on a US Gulf Coast (USGC) location basis and in English units. This report also includes the material balance table, a sized equipment list, process flow diagrams, capital cost, and production costs of each of the processes analyzed. The accompanying iPEP Navigator, an excel-based interactive module (available with the electronic version of this report), allows the user to compare the processes in different regions of interest, times, and units (English or metric).
The analysis is based on information given, by the technology providers, in open literature (such as patents or technical articles) or in-house generated data (e.g., HYSYS simulation and equipment cost estimation). While this assessment may not reflect the actual plant data fully, we do believe that it is sufficiently representative of the process and process economics within the range of accuracy necessary for economic evaluations of a process design.