Hydrogen, ethylene and power production from bioethanol: Ready for the renewable market?

The economic sustainability of renewable based sources is a matter of debate and the technology is changing very fast. We here considered three examples of exploitation of bioethanol as renewable source: a) centralised hydrogen prodution; b) heat and power cogeneration (residential scale); c) ethylene production. Bioethanol can be a suitable starting material for the production of H2, as fuel or chemical, or syngas. After designing the process and the implementation of kinetic expressions based on experimental data collected in our lab or derived from the literature, an economic evaluation and sensitivity analysis allowed to assess the economic sustainability of hydrogen production and purification by the steam reforming of bioethanol. The attention was mainly put on diluted bioethanol solutions, easy to purify and cost effective. The centralised hydrogen production from bioethanol was considered cost effective at least starting from diluted bioethanol from first generation crops. When dowscaling the hydrogen production and purification unit to feed a 5 kW fuel cell, the most undetermined item was the fuel cell cost, since no acclarate market price is still available. Finally, ethylene market is steadily increasing by ca. 4% each year due to economic growth. The demand for renewable ethylene, as well as the increasing oil price experienced in the recent past, suggested the development of alternative routes to ethylene. Based on the increasing availability of ethanol form renewable biomass, bioethanol-to-bioethylene processes have been recently designed, finding economic sustainability, at the moment, in Brazil.