Study On Emission Reduction for Chemical Industry Sustainability

Emission reduction is one of the major issues for chemical industry nowadays. This is not only because of the increasing stringent environmental regulations and public concerns for air emission, but also due to the fact that emission usually means the loss of process raw material and energy which supposedly could generate much needed products from the industry. Thus, emission reductions have significant impacts on environmental, societal, and economic advancement for chemical industry sustainability.

This paper will summarize the general idea of some best practice technologies for chemical plant emission reductions. The focus of the idea is from the system point of view to effectively use information technology (simulation, optimization, and scheduling) to help plant reduce air emissions. From the system point of view, the waste gas generation from some plant sections does not have to be zero. As long as the generated waste gas could be reused by the other sections to the maximum extent, the whole system emissions would be minimized. Therefore, to synchronize and balance operations of different sections of the entire chemical plant is the optimal way to reduce air emissions.

This paper will use two industrial emission examples to demonstrate the proposed idea. One is about the flare minimization for a chemical plant turnaround operations; the other is about air emission reductions for a petroleum refinery.