Towards ethylene production from carbon dioxide: Economic and global warming potential assessment

Currently, ethylene is the most important chemical with the largest global demand: it is mainly produced by ethane or naphtha cracking but, this is characterized by significant carbon dioxide emissions. For this reason, starting from carbon dioxide and water, different routes for ethylene production have been proposed and investigated in the literature but a complete comparative analysis is missing. In this research, we analyze ethylene production via carbon dioxide electroreduction and methanol-to-olefin process, with methanol obtained in several ways. After the modelling of these systems, economic and environmental (in term of global warming potential) analyses are conducted to develop a comparison among the investigated processes and a conventional one based on naphtha cracking. Results, located in the UK, show that the tandem process could be economically competitive (with the lowest production cost of $ 1.34 per kg of ethylene), while the methanol-to-olefin process with methanol obtained from syngas (produced through carbon dioxide-water co-electrolysis) has the best advantage for carbon dioxide emissions (with the lowest impact of −3.08 kg of CO2eq per kg of ethylene). Moreover, the most preferred energy source for the electricity supply is the nuclear one with a small-scale plant because, economic and greenhouse gas emission advantages are provided while, worse conditions are obtained when solar energy is used. Our main finding is that electrochemical processes are likely to play an important role in the future when performance improvements are realized.