oa Carbon footprint of the vinyl chloride monomer process

Qatar has experienced an unprecedented development in recent years as a result of its large oil and gas industry. It has the third confirmed reserve of natural gas in the world. With 55.4 tonnes of carbon dioxide per person, Qatar has the highest carbon footprint globally, about 10 times the global average. Against this background, there have been attempts to investigate ways to reduce carbon emissions since CO2 was deemed to be one of the major green house gases. Power generation is by far the biggest contributor to anthropogenic (man-made) carbon emissions. The carbon emission mitigation methods currently considered include both “end of pipe” and “at source” solutions. The techniques currently identified to capture carbon emissions from point sources from industrial activities include post combustion capture, precombustion capture and oxyfuel based capture. These techniques are currently at various stages of development. In this work, an important petrochemical process, namely the Vinyl Chloride Monomer (VCM) process has been selected for carbon footprinting. The primary fossil fuel equivalents, which in turn will be turned into CO2 emissions using combustion processes, were identified. Industrial standard simulation software HYSYS was used to carry out the calculations on the heat duties of the entire plant. Energy intensive sections in the VCM process were identified and their associated CO2 footprint calculated. The total CO2 emissions from VCM plant with a hypothetical capacity of 300,000MT/yr were estimated to be around 96,000 MT/yr, which means that for each 1 ton VCM produced, 0.32 ton of CO2 is emitted. In addition to the process related carbon emissions, non process CO2 emissions were estimated. This emission emanates from energy used to power lighting, electronic equipment, catering, in-house transportation etc. Good practice for energy saving and hence CO2 emission reduction was put forward.