Читать книгу Process Intensification and Integration for Sustainable Design - Группа авторов - Страница 23

Although intensification opportunities for shale gas technologies remain to be explored, it is worthy of mention its potential benefits and possible tradeoffs based on the results from research and applications of intensification methodologies. First, it could be mentioned that a direct economic impact that would favor investment and operating costs could be observed. A notable example is the intensified process design developed by Eastman Chemicals for the production of 400 kT/yr of methyl acetate that transformed a flowsheet with 10 units (one reactor and nine separation columns) into a single reactive‐distillation piece of equipment. The resulting intensified process had 1/5 of capital investment and 1/5 of energy costs with respect to the original process [39]. One could also expect improvements in other factors such as carbon footprint and global warming metrics [37]. However, tradeoffs with other aspects such as process inherent safety and process controllability remain to be assessed. In an initial work to account for process inherent safety for a case study dealing with the intensification of an isoamyl acetate process, it was found that a partially intensified process could provide a better alternative in terms of inherent safety expectations with respect to a fully intensified process [40]. On the other hand, the effect of losing degrees of freedom for process control that arises from intensifying an original process and how it affects the process operability and controllability is an item that remains to be addressed.