The societal urge to turn to sustainable challenges the Dutch chemical industry. Currently, safety considerations as well as economies of scale dictate a landscape of large installations clustering at industrial sites. Products include fertilizers, plastics, and vaccine carrier proteins and are mostly fossil derived. A roadmap to guide the industry to sustainable and circular does not yet exist as suitable technology is lacking.
The electrification of processes to deploy sustainable energy and mitigate CO2 emissions dominates ongoing sustainable technology development. Additional and sometimes even more challenging is the ambition to rely on circular raw materials only. This proposal concerns the production of acrylonitrile in a novel thermo-electric plasma process as a showcase of simultaneous electrification and a shift to circular raw materials. It will allow to study the complex optimization of safety, sustainability, cost-effectiveness, robustness, flexibility, regulatory compliance, and stakeholder interaction and acceptance.
Presently, acrylonitrile production is large scale and involves storage and transportation of large quantities of toxic and/or flammable substances. It is an intermediate for a range of materials such as ABS (for printing filaments and Lego), NBR (surgeon gloves), acrylic fibers (textiles), acrylamide (products for water treatment), and carbon fibers (wind turbine blades). The alternative plasma approach offers, from a process safety viewpoint, an inherent safer alternative by reducing process quantities and perhaps even allow local production at the site of the end users. Central question of the project is how safe-by-design opportunities for sustainable production can objectively be evaluated and related to aforementioned optimization factors.
