The transportation sector in the United States depends heavily on petroleum as the primary energy source. The nationwide demand of petroleum in 2011 was 18.95 million barrels per day with 70% of it from the transportation sector. The sector currently faces challenges due to high crude oil prices and high levels of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the production of liquid transportation fuels. Recent studies investigated the improvement of the United States energy sector by utilizing domestic sources such as coal, biomass and natural gas. A recent review by Floudas et al., has shown that single or hybrid feedstock energy systems can produce transportation fuels with different design alternatives.This study focuses on a particularly important biomass type, Municipal Solid Waste (MSW). Each year, United States produces over 250 million tons of MSW. Moreover, it has competitive energy content and it is negatively priced. Usually, this abundant MSW is burnt to produce power. Due to the huge demand in the transportation sector, we posed the following question: Are the Waste to Liquid Transportation Fuels (WTL) Systems economically viable to pursue?A process synthesis approach for the conversion of MSW to liquid fuels is introduced. An optimization based framework performs an economic and environmental analysis of WTL plants that will convert MSW to liquid fuels. In this framework, process synthesis and global optimization strategies will be included to determine the optimum plant topology. The cost of utilities and wastewater generation is minimized through a simultaneous heat, power and water integration approach. Different case studies will be presented to investigate the effect of plant capacity and the product distribution on the optimal process topology. Major topological decisions resulting from the optimization model will be outlined, as well as the break-even oil price, total investment cost and GHG emissions.

Novel mathematical modeling, process synthesis and global optimization of waste to liquid transportation fuels (WTL) systems

247th National Meeting (2014)

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