Mass and Energy Balance Analysis of Methanol Production Using Atmospheric CO2 Capture with Energy Source from PCMSR

¹ Department of Nuclear Engineering and Engineering Physics, Faculty of Engineering, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indonesia

^* Corresponding author: andangftn@yahoo.com, andangwh@ugm.ac.id

Abstract

The rising of atmospheric CO2 concentration is the major source to global warming system. Many methods have been proposed to mitigate global warming, such as carbon penalty, carbon trading, CO2 sequestration, etc. However these proposed methods are usually uneconomical, i.e., these methods do not produce economic valuable substances. This paper will propose a method to absorb atmospheric CO2 to produce economic valuable substances such as methanol, dimethyl ether, ethylene, several hydrocarbon substances and derivatives and several graphite substances. This paper is focused on methanol production using atmospheric CO2 capture. The overall process is endothermic. Thus a sufficient energy source is needed. To avoid more CO2 emission, the energy source must not use conventional fuels. To assure the continuity of energy deliberation, nuclear energy will be used as the energy source of the process. In this paper, the Passive Compact Molten Salt Reactor (PCMSR) will be used as the energy source. The 460 MWth PCMSR is coupled with atmospheric CO2 capture, desalination, hydrogen production and methanol production facilities. The capturing CO2 capacity is 7.2 ton/h of atmospheric CO2. The valuable outputs of this system are 3.34 ton/h of H2, 34.56 ton/h of O2, 5.24 ton/h of methanol and 86.74 MWe of excess electricity.