Butadiene production via the direct dehydrogenation of n-butane in membrane reactors:A techno-economic analysis

The direct dehydrogenation of butane (BDH) is emerging as an attractive on-purpose technology for the direct production of 1,3-butadine. However, its product yield is hindered by the high rate of carbon deposition associated to the high temperature required for the highly endothermic reaction. In this work, we evaluated the use of membrane reactor with H2-selective membranes, to increase the yield of the dehydrogenation process at milder operating conditions. The novel proposed membrane reactor (MR)-assisted BDH technology is compared from a techno-economic point of view with the benchmark technology. The results of this analysis reveal that the membrane reactor technology allows to maintain same production capacity as the benchmark technology, working at milder operating conditions and most importantly lowering the required shale gas-based feedstock; this will result in an overall plant efficiency almost 20% higher in the MR-assisted plant, being equal to 37.7% with respect to the one of the benchmark case, which is 50.92%. This work demonstrates that MR-assisted technology is a valuable alternative to the conventional BDH technology, reducing of almost 20% the final cost of production of 1,3-butadiene, due to the lower installation costs and the higher energy efficiency.