Abstract
Existing literature lacks detailed techno-economic and environmental life cycle analyses (TEA-LCA) focused on supercritical biodiesel production pathways produced via waste products. Therefore, in this work, the TEA-LCA was conducted to generate supercritical biodiesel from waste cooking oil for plants located in the Midwest region of USA having annual production capacities of 10,600 and 128,000 t using Aspen Plus and GREET softwares. Two plant production capacities were chosen to capture the economies of scale impact on biodiesel manufacture cost. In the supercritical process, methanol and propane were used as a cosolvent to synthesize biodiesel from waste cooking oil (WCO) at 280 °C and 128 bar at a residence time of 8.4 min and a WCO conversion rate of 97%. Economic analysis revealed that the supercritical process was an economically attractive pathway with a 2-year payback period for the 10,600 t/year capacity along with a break-even selling price of $2.42/gal of diesel. In case of the larger plant (128,000 t/year capacity), the payback period and the breakeven selling price were considerably lower at values of 0.4 years and $1.31/gal of diesel, respectively, due to economies of scale impact. The generated biodiesel from supercritical process for the both the plant capacities met European (EN14214) and US (ASTM D6751) fuel quality standards while the obtained commercially valuable side product, i.e., glycerol, adhered to a pharmaceutical grade of 99.7%. Cradle to gate life cycle analysis using GREET revealed that supercritical process possessed 17% lower CO2 emissions than alkali-catalyzed process and 4% lower CO2 emissions than the conventional diesel production process. Other biodiesel production pathways in the literature were also compared to the results of the TEA-LCA of supercritical biodiesel production pathway.
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Abbreviations
- ASTM:
-
American Standard for Testing and Materials
- ASTM D6751:
-
American Standard for Testing and Materials Guidelines for Final Biodiesel Quality
- CO2:
-
Carbon dioxide
- CEPCI:
-
Chemical Engineering Plant Cost Index
- Distil1:
-
Methanol recovery distillation column
- Distil2:
-
Methyl oleate purification distillation column
- EN 14,214:
-
European standard for testing and materials guidelines for final biodiesel quality
- Flashdr:
-
Methanol recovery flash drum
- GJ:
-
Giga Joule
- GREET:
-
He greenhouse gases, regulated emissions, and energy use in technologies model by Argonne national laboratory
- H1-H8:
-
Heat exchangers in the biodiesel production plant of 10,600 t/year capacity
- H1-H12:
-
Heat exchangers in the biodiesel production plant of 128,000 t/year capacity
- ISO 14040:
-
International organization for standardization guideline on LCA
- LCA:
-
Life cycle assessment
- PEC:
-
Purchase equipment costs
- SID:
-
Supplemental information document
- S1 to S25:
-
Material streams in Aspen process flow sheet
- TEMA:
-
Tubular exchangers manufacturers association guiding principles
- TEA:
-
Techno-economic analysis
- UNIQUAC:
-
Universal quasi-chemical thermodynamic model
- WCO:
-
Waste cooking oil
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Acknowledgements
The authors express their deep gratitude to Eileen Smith, Olivia Shafer, Richard Hoefer, Elliot Sutton, Muhielan Vasuthevan, Conor Nuernberger, and A**kya Pandit for their assistance during the production of this work. This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC, under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the US Department of Energy (DOE). The US government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the US government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for US government purposes. DOE will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan).
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The authors would like to acknowledge the financial support provided by Wayne and Gayle Laufer endowment for this research work.
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Nagapurkar, P., Smith, J.D. Techno-economic and life cycle analyses for a supercritical biodiesel production process from waste cooking oil for a plant located in the Midwest United States. Environ Dev Sustain (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-023-03064-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-023-03064-9