Renewable-driven Chemical Processes via Power-to-Gas Concepts

Chemical products play a significant role in the energy system. To reduce fossil-fuel consumption and mitigate the impact of climate change from the production of chemicals using natural gas and coal, the investigation of green chemical production processes become essential. Biomass is a promising renewable carbon resource substitute for fossil fuels to produce chemical products. However, state-of-the-art biomass-to-chemical conversion requires an increased hydrogen concentration in the syngas derived from biomass gasification, which is achieved by water-gas-shift reaction and CO2 removal, resulting in using less than half of the biomass carbon with the remaining part emitted as CO2. To overcome this problem, biomass-to-chemical technologies integrated with renewable power-to-hydrogen systems come into being as an alternative concept. In this thesis, renewable-driven chemical processes using solid-oxide electrolyzer are implemented and compared with the state-of-the-art ones for various products (i.e., methane, methanol, dimethyl ether, jet fuel, ammonia, and urea) through innovative conceptual process design, thermochemical modelling, energy integration, techno-economic evaluation, and multi-objective optimization.