An Environmentally Friendly Configuration for the Visbreaking Reactor Through Thermal Integration with Chemical Looping Combustion: Inherent CO2 Capture

Nowadays, CO ₂ emissions into the atmosphere are causing an increase in the world’s average temperature. For this reason, it is necessary to capture CO ₂ before its release into the atmosphere to combat global warming. In this study, the conventional furnace of the soaker visbreaking (VB) process, which releases a considerable amount of CO ₂ into the atmosphere, is eliminated, and the coil reactor is thermally integrated with the chemical looping combustion reactors (coil-CLC) as a green heat source. A techno-economic assessment (TEA) is then carried out to investigate the performance of the coil-CLC and compare it with that of the conventional configuration. A mathematical model is developed to compare the technical aspects of the coil-CLC design with those of the conventional configuration. The obtained technical results indicate that the green configuration, in addition to enabling easy CO ₂ sequestration, can produce 20% more gasoline and 6.40% more gas oil compared to the conventional configuration. Furthermore, the TEA showed that the green configuration is slightly more economically viable than the conventional design at zero carbon tax rate. However, as the carbon tax rate increases, the economic advantage of the green design over the conventional configuration grows significantly.