On the assessment of renewable industrial processes: Case study for solar co-production of methanol and power

The transition to renewable energies has mainly happened in the field of electric energy. In industrial processes only a negligible share of the energy consumption is supplied by renewable energies. To increase this share, several processes were proposed in the past. However, for a meaningful evaluation and optimization of such processes, no appropriate criterion exists. In particular, renewable energy is still the limited resource. To identify the best use of renewable energy, a new evaluation procedure for renewable industrial processes is proposed. The novel procedure is applied to the co-production of electricity and methanol from solar energy and natural gas. The SOLME process for solar methanol production is proposed, optimized and evaluated with the proposed criterion. The results indicate that the proposed SOLME process can make more efficient use of the solar energy than conventional solar power plants. Hence, the solar methanol production is promising to initiate a further penetration of solar energy into the chemical industry.