Process heat
Process heat refers to the application of
byproducts or wastes of the overall industrial process are available, those are often used to provide process heat. Examples include black liquor in papermaking or bagasse
in sugarcane processing.
Requirements
 | This section needs additional citations for verification. (July 2023) |
The required
principle of Le Chatelier
). However, there are limits to this as the speed of reaction is also temperature-dependent. Catalysts can serve to increase the speed of reaction at any given temperature but they, by definition, do not shift the equilibrium.
Decarbonization
Process heat accounts for approximately 30% of all the fuel use in the manufacturing sector, and is the target of significant efforts to introduce new forms of
waste tires - are commonly used as replacement fuels or mixed into conventional fuel at appropriate ratios.[1] Biomass is already in widespread use in industry, while geothermal, concentrated solar power and nuclear power remain experimental and are not currently economically competitive. A problem with using nuclear power for process heat is that commonly used pressurized water reactors have an operating temperature well below 400°C[2] and boiling water reactors work at lower temperatures still (around 285 °C (545 °F)).[3] The Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor - whose high coolant outlet temperature was an explicit design goal - has proven a technological dead end and no other high temperature nuclear power plant has ever entered widespread commercial operation as of 2022.[4] Some Generation IV reactor proposals would change this, allowing higher grade heat to be produced. Likewise geothermal heat sources often have relatively low temperatures, sometimes even requiring binary cycles for electricity generation.[5][6]
A stopgap solution for decarbonization at the price of increased costs (ignoring
sulfur-iodine cycle
themselves require high temperatures, their feasibility for generating hydrogen as a fuel for process heat as opposed to the direct use of the heat needed for the process seems questionable.
References
- ^ "Von Altreifen zum Ersatzbrennstoff". 2 June 2022.
- ^ "Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) Systems" (PDF), Reactor Concepts Manual, USNRC Technical Training Center, archived from the original (PDF) on 2022-08-12
- ^ "Boiling water reactor - Energy Education".
- ^ "Advanced Gas Reactor - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics".
- ^ "Geothermal Source Temperature - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics".
- ^ Finger, John; Blankenship, Doug (December 2010). Handbook of Best Practices for Geothermal Drilling (PDF) (Report). Sandia National Laboratories. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2022-04-18.
Further reading
- Toledano, Ilan (16 May 2016). "Process heating for manufacturing 101". Processing.
- "Renewable Industrial Process Heat". Environmental Protection Agency. 28 October 2014.