(136a) Natural Gas Utilization and Resilience Study for Simultaneous Production of Electricity, Nitrogen Fertilizer and Salicylic Acid with Inherent CO2 Sequestration

The increasing global human population, rapid growth of energy and food demand, and the escalating concern of global CO₂ emissions will continuously bring great challenges to the world. As one of the most abundant and available alternative energy/material resources, natural gas should be comprehensively utilized to help mitigate these concerns. In this paper, a material-heat-power integrated conceptual design of an industrial complex for comprehensive natural gas utilization has been proposed, modeled, and examined. It includes five subsystems (termed A³US): (i) an air separation unit (ASU); (ii) an Allam-cycle power plant (ACPP); (iii) an ammonia plant (APP); (iv) a urea production plant (UPP), and (v) a salicylic acid plant (SAP). The complex employs natural gas and air as the main feedstock. Through optimal integraton of their energy and material streams among five subsystems, the A³US complex will simultaneously produce multiple products including net power, urea, salicylic acid, pipeline-ready CO₂, pure N₂, and steam effectively and efficiently. Meanwhile, the A³US complex completely has no NOx emissions and barely has CO₂ emissions. The developed A³US complex has been virtually demonstrated by large-scale rigorous modeling and simulations. Based on the simulation results, two resilience indexes have also been developed to quantify the system resilience of the developed A³US complex: (i) the emission resilience index gauging the ratio of CO₂ utilization and sequestration rates to the total CO₂ generation rate and (ii) the economic resilience index measuring the ratio of compound product profit to that from average product markets. These two resilience indexes help highlight the sailent environmental and economic benefits of the A³US complex.