CHE.12 Scrubbing The Steel Industry

• Abdulla Alhajeri
• Humaid Almansoori
• Michael Kudelka
• Matthieu Vallet

Around the world, many organizations are thinking of new ways to combat greenhouse gas emissions. The largest emitter of greenhouse gas comes from the steel Industry. They emit roughly 25 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions in the industrial sector which is bigger than cement by 6 percent. In this project, we aim to combat this problem and use carbon dioxide from basic oxygen furnaces and coke ovens which make up more than 50 percent of all carbon dioxide emitted by steel plants. The plant selected for this project is located in Gary, Indiana at US Steel Gary Works. This plant produces 10 million tons of carbon dioxide per year. The biggest struggle is finding an economically viable option to use carbon dioxide. With the new technology of hydrogenation, carbon dioxide can be converted into methanol. The goal of this project is to capture 500 thousand tons of carbon dioxide per year to produce 440 thousand tons of methanol per year which equate to 3.6 million barrels of methanol. The methanol plant is simulated using Aspen Plus, a simulation software used to create a fictitious plant that hydrogenized the incoming carbon dioxide with hydrogen. The project also required looking over the safety, controls, and economic viability of the plant. After closely analyzing our project the plant would seem to be viable and would be able to reduce greenhouse gasses produced by US Steel Gary Work.