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Conflict of Interest: In relation to this article, we declare that there is no conflict of interest.

Publication history: Received March 13, 2021
Accepted June 22, 2021

This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/3.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Producing hydrocarbon fuel from the plastic waste: Techno-economic analysis

Hamad Almohamadi^1† Majed Alamoudi^{2 3} Usama Ahmed^{4 5} Rashid Shamsuddin⁶ Kevin Smith³

¹Department of Chemical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Islamic University of Madinah, Madinah, Saudi Arabia ²Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia ³Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, University of British Columbia, 2360 East Mall, Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z3, Canada ⁴Chemical Engineering Department, King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia ⁵Interdisciplinary Research Center for Hydrogen and Energy Storage, King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia ⁶HICoE, Centre for Biofuel and Biochemical Research (CBBR), Institute for Sustainable 6 Living, Department of Chemical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, 32610 7 Bandar Seri Iskandar, Perak Darul Ridzuan, Malaysia

hha@iu.edu.sa

Korean Journal of Chemical Engineering, November 2021, 38(11), 2208-2216(9), 10.1007/s11814-021-0876-3

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Abstract

Dumping plastic waste into landfills can lead to severe health and environmental problems. Plastic waste can be treated by the pyrolysis process to produce fuel. A techno-economic and feasibility assessment was performed for plastic-waste pyrolysis followed by hydrodeoxygenation to upgrade the fuel using the software Aspen Plus. A simulation was conducted using Aspen Plus to estimate the plant's mass and energy balance; it is assumed that 1,000 dry metric tons of plastic waste is processed per day. Plastic waste contains 40% polystyrene (PS), 20% polyethylene (PE), 20% polypropylene (PP), and 20% polyethylene terephthalate (PET). The process is simulated in five steps: pretreatment, pyrolysis, hydrogen production, and hydrodeoxygenation of oil and energy generation. The mass and the energy yields of this process are 36% and 42%, respectively. The capital investment of the plant and the production cost were calculated based on the Aspen Plus model. Based on the economic estimation, the capital investment of this process is $118 million and the production cost is $27 million. For the 20-year project, the minimum selling price (MSP) of the fuel was calculated to be $0.60/gal. Sensitivity analysis was performed to verify the economic assumptions on the MSP. The MSP is highly sensitive to the feedstock cost, plant capacity, and product yield. As the plant capacity or product yield increases, the MSP decreases significantly.

Keywords

Plastic Aspen Plus Process Modelling Fast Pyrolysis Techno-economic Assessment Waste Management

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