Environmental
and Economic Assessment of Electrothermal
Swing Adsorption of Air Emissions
from Sheet-Foam Production Compared to Conventional Abatement Techniques
- Publication date
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Abstract
A life-cycle assessment (LCA) and
cost analysis are presented comparing
the environmental and economic impacts of using regenerative thermal
oxidizer (RTO), granular activated carbon (GAC), and activated carbon
fiber cloth (ACFC) systems to treat gaseous emissions from sheet-foam
production. The ACFC system has the lowest operational energy consumption
(i.e., 19.2, 8.7, and 3.4 TJ/year at a full-scale facility for RTO,
GAC, and ACFC systems, respectively). The GAC system has the smallest
environmental impacts across most impact categories for the use of
electricity from select states in the United States that produce sheet
foam. Monte Carlo simulations indicate the GAC and ACFC systems perform
similarly (within one standard deviation) for seven of nine environmental
impact categories considered and have lower impacts than the RTO for
every category for the use of natural gas to produce electricity.
The GAC and ACFC systems recover adequate isobutane to pay for themselves
through chemical-consumption offsets, whereas the net present value
of the RTO is 4.1M(20years,0.001/m<sup>3</sup> treated). The
adsorption systems are more environmentally and economically competitive
than the RTO due to recovered isobutane for the production process
and are recommended for resource recovery from (and treatment of)
sheet-foam-production exhaust gas. Research targets for these adsorption
systems should focus on increasing adsorptive capacity and saturation
of GAC systems and decreasing electricity and N<sub>2</sub> consumption
of ACFC systems
