Comparative technoeconomic analysis and life cycle assessment of aromatics production from methanol and naphtha

In order to reduce dependence of the aromatics industry on petroleum, methanol to aromatics is of great interest and has been widely studied. This work presents a comparative technoeconomic and environmental analysis of producing aromatics from methanol and naphtha. First, the processes of producing aromatics from methanol and naphtha are modeled in the Aspen HYSYS simulator to obtain detailed mass and energy balances. On this basis, the technoeconomic and life cycle analyses are conducted. The comparative results indicate that the net present value of producing aromatics from methanol is significantly higher than producing aromatics from naphtha. Moreover, the total capital investment of the former is lower than the latter. In terms of the ten studied impact categories, methanol derived from natural gas leads to the least freshwater aquatic ecotoxicity potential, while that derived from biomass shows the lowest abiotic depletion potential, global warming potential, ozone layer depletion potential, and photochemical ozone creation potential. However, naphtha does the best performance regarding the rest five impact categories.