Uso de processos industriais alternativos para promover a economia circular na indústria química: estudo de caso na indústria de fertilizantes

Abstract

The concept of a Circular Economy has attracted worldwide attention in recent years due to the increasing need for sustainable production and consumption patterns in social, environmental and economic aspects. The Circular Economy is seen as an alternative to the current linear economic model, which uses the “take-make-dispose” industrial model and causes several negative impacts, such as environmental degradation, industrial waste and high CO2 emissions. The transition from linear to circular model is fostered by Industrial Ecology through the analysis of material and energy flows of industrial systems in closed cycles, in which industrial waste serves as input for other processes, thus eliminating the concept of undesirable by-product. The chemical industry and its technological innovations can accelerate this transition due to the enormous influence on many upstream and downstream production chains, such as the fertilizer industry. Nitrogen is the basis for these fertilizers and it is converted to ammonia by the Haber Bosch synthesis. This work was developed to study two different ammonia production processes which use alternative technologies, water electrolysis and chemical looping process, that can be adopted to accelerate the transition from the linear model to the Circular Economy model in the nitrogen-based fertilizers production. The positive and negative aspects of these processes were analyzed, comparing them to the conventional process. Both alternative processes are able to reduce or eliminate the negative impacts of the conventional ammonia production process according to the circular economy concept and investment is needed to develop these technologies to be applied on a large commercial scale.