Techno-Economic Analysis of a Hybrid Process for Propylene and Ammonia Production

ABSTRACT: Hydrogen as a large-scale byproduct from the propane dehydrogenation process is of great value for the downstream value-added chemical production. The paper describes a hybrid process which combines the production of propylene and ammonia using hydrogen produced from the propane dehydrogenation process. The utility consumption and economic cost of the hybrid process are investigated in comparison with the standalone propylene production and methane-toammonia processes. Due to the combination of the endothermic propane dehydrogenation process and exothermic ammonia synthesis process, the hybrid process can achieve a more efficient heat exchange capacity with lower utility requirement. The utility consumption of the hybrid process is 3.5% lower than the summation of standalone propylene production at 900 kt/year and ammonia production at 220 kt/year. The total production cost of the hybrid process is 13.6 M$/year lower at this production scale. Although the production costs of all processes increase with the increase of resource prices and decrease of produce scale, the hybrid process still shows higher economic performance than the summation of those of the two individual processes. This study can potentially instruct the efficient utilization of the byproduct hydrogen from the propane dehydrogenation process for downstream value-added chemical production processes.