(170a) Techno-Economic Analysis of Waste Plastic Gasification to Methanol Process

Gasification represents a potential process to convert waste plastics to produce value-added products. One potential advantage of gasification is that it is mostly feedstock agnostic – namely, the plastic chemistry is not as important as it is for other recycling and upcycling technologies. This work reports a detailed techno-economic analysis (TEA) with Aspen Plus and supply chain analysis via Materials Flows through Industry (MFI) of the waste plastic gasification process to produce methanol. Steam gasification was modeled to convert the solid feedstock into syngas, which is cleaned and modeled with a Cu-based catalyst to produce methanol. Sensitivity analysis was performed to investigate the effect of various process parameters on the methanol Minimum Selling Price (MSP).

Our analysis indicates that methanol produced by waste plastic gasification exhibits an MSP substantially higher than fossil-fuel-derived methanol. The main driver of the methanol MSP is the feedstock cost, which is assumed to be $0.66/kg in our analysis. Sensitivity analysis indicates that cost-parity with fossil-fuel methanol can be achieved if the waste plastic feedstock is available at very low prices; materials recovery facilities (MRF) may have some waste plastic streams available at this price. Overall, this work identifies the important parameters that have the potential to reduce the MSP of methanol produced by waste plastic gasification.