Ethylene production is mainly via steam cracking.

Steam cracking to produce ethylene is an

endothermic process, as such these process rely on the combustion of fossil fuels to supply the
heat requirements. This results in more than 4 tonne CO2 per tonne olefins produced.
In addition, the shale gas boom in 2009 resulted in a substantial increase in supply of natural gas
worldwide. Natural gas typically contain mostly methane. This result also in an increase of LNG
as places which usually import NG are now turning to export NG via LNG. Methane can only be
converted to ethylene via 2 routes. Methane can be converted to ethylene via a direct route
through the oxidative coupling of methane to ethylene process (OCM) or via an indirect route
Methanol to Olefin process(MTO). This study will be focusing on the use of OCM process as
MTO has commercial plants available whereas no commercial plants are known to exist using
the OCM process. The advantage of OCM process compared to steam cracking is that it is an
exothermic process, thus energy do not need to be supplied. The disadvantage faced though is
that it has poor conversion and selectivity towards ethylene due to the relatively stable properties
of methane.
However, Yaser & Adams has proposed a polygeneration process which can produce ethylene at
a cost close to traditional steam cracking. The OCM process requires high power consumption
for refrigerant generation for its separation process. It was noted in his paper that 67 to 78% of
power consumption was due to the cooling load of the separators. Therefore a more efficient
method of generating the cooling load would result in a further decrease in cost.
LNG are usually supplied at -160C and at 1 atm. LNG typically needs to be re-gasified into NG
before it can be used by process plant or distributed via pipeline. Most regasification plants
currently utilizes Open rack vaporizer and submerged combustion vaporizer [1]. These processes
destroy the potential exergy that can be extracted from LNG Regasification and produces no
other useful products. Using LNG as a feed can potentially allow the further decrease in cost
since LNG cold exergy are mostly wasted through heat exchanger.
In this work, we use HYSYS as a process simulator to perform detail simulations for the
following three case study followed by a detailed techno-economic analysis.

Case Study 1: Ethylene production plant with LNG as feed stock and methane as byproduct.
Amount of external refrigerant determine recycled methane.
LNG + BOG ethylene + % methane
Case Study 2: Direct BOG Utilization for ethylene production
BOG ethylene & heat
Heat + LNG NG
Case Study 3: LNG Regasification plant with ethylene production as source of heat.
NGethylene & heat
LNG + BOG +heat NG
A techno-economic analysis is then carried out on these process to determine the feasibility of
these processes.

Case 1: Pure ethylene production plant. No Methane sendout. Full Recycle of Methane and
Ethane. Purge Methane with CO,H2,N2 converted to Hydrogen products for sale/burned to
generate power/syngas to methanol (MTO method)(might not have enough time or making it a
lot more complicated. External refrigerant required for full methane recycle. So methane sendout
Configuration of the plant may be required for optimization, e.g arrangement of distillation
column.
This might be similar to the 1 I sent on skype on lng ocm.
Case 2: Regasification plant with ethylene production. Methane sendout with Full recycle of
ethane. Purge Methane converted to Hydrogen products for sale/burned to generate power/MTO
Also another concern I have is the quality of sendout,methane is 99.95 % with impurities consist
of CO and H2, can NG contain CO and H2, if it can contain both, we can just include both
sendout since the HHV content of the NG is higher than that required for NG, if it can contain
only H2, then a shift reactor can be used to convert CO to CO2.
Case 1 and case 2 can be merged and decision variable would be the recycle ratio
Case 3: Direct BOG utilization using LNG as refrigerant
(Determine minimum/maximum amount of LNG required for each kg of BOG produced) since
BOG is supposed to be a function of LNG tank surface area not flowrate so it should be constant.
Case 4: Utilization part of NG sendout to generate ethylene and provide heating for LNG
Regasification process ( I think using piped natural gas is a bit weird since the NG sendout is
supposed to be directed to pipeline.)
Case 3 and case 4 difference is 1 directly uses BOG only the other recondenses then utilize the
sendout.