Methane-to-X: an economic assessment of methane valorisation options to improve carbon circularity

Methane side streams are produced in many different chemical processes and are normally combusted to provide process heat or to generate electricity. However, this practice is becoming less and less attractive as the industry strives towards net-zero targets and increasing the circularity of chemicals. Methane could instead be recovered and used as a valuable feedstock to produce other platform chemicals, such as H2 or ethylene, which could be beneficial both for the economic performance and the carbon circularity of the system. In this work, seven different methane valorisation routes to produce additional chemicals are investigated. The considered routes include: i) five syngas-based routes combined with methanol synthesis and a methanol-to-olefins process; ii) plasma methane pyrolysis; and iii) oxidative coupling of methane. The results suggest that oxidative coupling of methane is the most profitable, with methane pyrolysis, tri-reforming and autothermal reforming also being more profitable in the base case. All routes have lower scope 1 and 2 emissions than the base case, however, dry-reforming and bi-reforming have the lowest emissions thanks to credited CO2 feed streams.