Modular methanol manufacturing from shale gas: Techno‐economic and environmental analyses of conventional large‐scale production versus small‐scale distributed, modular processing

This article presents comparative techno‐economic and environmental analyses of four representative shale gas monetization options, namely, conventional shale gas processing, large‐scale methanol manufacturing, modular methanol manufacturing with shale gas supplied by pipelines, and modular methanol manufacturing with consideration of plant relocation. We first present shale gas supply models for the four gas monetization options. Next, the process designs for shale gas processing and methanol manufacturing from shale gas are described. We develop detailed process simulation models for shale gas processing and methanol manufacturing with different scales using raw shale gas extracted from the Marcellus, Eagle Ford, and Bakken shale plays. On this basis, techno‐economic analyses and environmental impact analyses are conducted for the four shale gas monetization options to systematically compare their economic and environmental performances based on the same conditions. The results show that modular methanol manufacturing is more economically competitive than conventional shale gas processing, although it leads to higher environmental impacts. Besides, modular methanol manufacturing is better than large‐scale methanol manufacturing for raw shale gas produced from distributed, remote wells from both economic and environmental perspectives. © 2017 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J , 64: 495–510, 2018