A Statistical Approach for Estimation of Process Flow Data from Production of Chemicals of Fossil Origin (6 pp) |
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Authors: | Bengt Steen |
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Institution: | (1) Bengt Steen, PhD, Adj. professor Centre for the Assessment of Products and Material Systems, CPM and Dept. of Environmental Systems Analysis Chalmers University of Technology SE-41296 Gothenburg Sweden, , , |
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Abstract: | Goal, Scope and Background The life cycles of many products including textiles contain chemicals for which process flow data are not known or are too
time consuming to collect. Although each chemical may not contribute significantly to the LCA results of the product, which
might justify excluding them, but together their contribution could be significant. Similarly, rough estimates of the process
flows for the production of a single chemical may be very uncertain and considered meaningless, while the estimates of the
cumulative data of process flows for several chemicals may be less uncertain and be a meaningful contribution to the quality
of the LCA results. There are methods for estimation of process flows for different types of products, with varying demands
regarding input data and time and with varying accuracy of the results. This work contributes to the available methods, focusing
on simple estimations for production of chemical substances. The goal was to create a fast method for estimation of emissions,
resource and energy flows (process flows) for the production of chemicals, based on easily available data on the properties
of the chemicals. The process flows investigated were limited to those normally associated with process industries and contributing
most to depletion of resources, to global warming, acidification, eutrophication and photochemical ozone production, i.e.
use of energy, crude oil, coal, natural gas, uranium in ore and emissions of CO2, SOx, NOx, NMVOC, methane, BOD, COD and total
N. Toxic substances were excluded, since toxic emissions are substance specific and cannot be included in a generalization.
Method Available data for the process flows for the production of chemicals of mainly fossil origin were correlated to properties
of chemicals such as amount of carbon in the molecule, heat of formation and average number of chemical reaction steps in
the production. The production procedures were found in readily available literature. Up to about six reaction steps were
evaluated in the correlation study. The variations in the process flows among the chemicals studied were calculated.
Results and Discussion There were weak correlations between average number of chemical reaction steps in the production and energy use, COD measured
in water emissions, and SOx and NOx emissions to air. For the remaining properties of chemicals and process flows, there were
only weak correlations for share of double bonding in the molecule if only molecules containing double bondings were included.
Conclusions The precision in estimation of the process flows increases non-significantly when adding information on the number of reaction
steps or share of double bonding for chemicals containing double bonding is added.
Recommendations and Outlook It seems reasonable to start with a simple grouping method to estimate the process flows for the production of a chemical
of fossil origin. Further investigations might investigate whether there is a correlation between process flows and the costs
of chemicals, and further study the correlations between process flows and share of double bonding for chemicals containing
double bondings. |
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Keywords: | environmental impacts average number of reaction steps process flow estimation methods properties of chemicals standard deviation of estimates |
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