Innovation with Hybrid Tecnologies: Nafta/Etanol Cases

EFBôto Consultoria Ltda, Brazil

Abstract: The traditional petrochemical processes that use naphtha have little perspective of discovering new products or enhancing operational performance. On the other hand, the processes used in the sugar alcohol industry in Brazil to produce hydrocarbons or other petroleum products using ethanol are always more expensive than those that use naphtha, due to necessary additional processes and loss of atomic efficiency. In petrochemical processes, a polymer grade for raw materials is usually required because other hydrocarbons, especially those with unsaturated chains, are impurities of high and low speed to reaction with catalysts, occasioning an increase in consumption and interfering with the characteristics of the final product. The polymer grade is characterized for the requirement of its purity as above 99.9%, while the chemical grade requires the raw material to have a purity of 95.0%. However, the energy consumption to go from chemical grade to polymer grade is significant, having an impact on the production costs. This paper presents case studies in which hybrid naphtha/ethanol technologies using chemical grade raw materials were shown to be more efficient on the final product. This paper refers to two case studies of naphtha/ethanol hybrid technologies using chemical grade raw materials. The first case shows the advantage of ethanol impurity in the production of a traditional petrochemical product. The second case shows the advantage of petrochemical impurity in the production of a product traditionally of the alcohol industry.