Safety and techno-economic analysis of ethylene technologies

• Techno-economic analysis favors ethane cracking.
• Inherent safety analysis favoring gas to ethylene.
• Risk analysis to identify major sources of concerns.

Recent growth in shale gas production has contributed to the interest in establishing numerous petrochemical plants for shale-gas monetization. The ethylene industry is one of the main beneficiaries of such growth because of the switch from the conventional naphtha feedstock to shale-gas constituents. Different technologies must be screened and compared. In addition to the typical approach of performing techno-economic analysis for comparing technologies, it is important to consider safety aspects early enough in the selection process. This paper presents a comparative approach for two ethylene-production technologies through techno-economic and safety analysis. The primary process route is a state of art process while other is a novel process that is still in development stage. The conventional process route is ethane steam cracking which is a well-established process. The competing candidate is ECLAIRS (Ethylene from Concentrated Liquid phase Acetylene- Integrated, Rapid and Safe) which is an emerging gas to ethylene process. A top level analysis is performed using key quantitative indicators of process, cost and inherent safety. The results show that the conventional technology of ethane cracking has an attractive process and economic potential while the emerging gas to ethylene technology is inherently safer. The areas of improvement are identified and a critical analysis of metrics is carried out.