Exergy and thermoeconomic evaluation of a petroleum refinery hydrogem production unit. / Produção de hidrogênio em refinarias de petróleo: avaliação exergética e custo de produção.

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2010

RESUMO

Pure hydrogen (H2) is an useful gas in chemical and petrochemical industries because it reacts easily with several other elements. On refineries, hydrogen is used to sequestrate sulphur from diesel and gasoline. Emission restrictions regard to fossil fuels are rising the world hydrogen demands. In spite of its abundance, hydrogen is normally found associated with other chemical species like water or hidrocarbons like methane or butane. Some especific processes are required to obtain pure hydrogen. Considered the most economic production route, the natural gas reforming process is analyzed by exergetic and thermoeconomic methods in order to determine the efficiencies and the hydrogen production cost. The hydrogen production cost is very sensitive to the cost of natural gas, which has suffered constant increases due to rising demand. This fact opens the possibility of using technologies that were previously considered economically unviable. The hydrogen unit studied was constructed in one of the Petrobras refineries, and the hydrogen produced is for the removal of sulfur in diesel oil. Based on project documents exergetic efficiencies of each component were determined. After that, an economic analysis was conducted in order to determine the construction, operation and maintenance costs of the whole plant. Two types of cost were determined, the actual cost production, which indicates the current cost product (2010), and the levelized cost, which takes into account the total production over life of the plant. Considering a natural gas cost equal to 9.11 US$/GJ, it was obtained an actual hydrogen production cost of 17.36 US$/GJ (2,093.13 US$/t) and a levelized cost of 25.35 US$/GJ (3,056.97 $/t). These values were compared with some hydrogen production costs presents on scientific papers and related references.

ASSUNTO(S)

cost evaluation hidrogênio termoeconomia custo de produção hydrogen thermoeconomy refinery refinaria exergia exergy

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