The role of heat recovery technologies in enabling industrial decarbonisation
File(s)
Author(s)
Maghrabi, Abdullah
Type
Thesis
Abstract
Implementing waste heat recovery (WHR) in energy-intensive industries still faces technical, economic, policy, and management challenges. Moving the needle would require understanding the potential role of WHR to industrial decarbonisation, especially how investments in the deployment of WHR can accelerate industrial decarbonisation. This thesis investigates whether investments in WHR technologies can effectively accelerate the decarbonisation of energy-intensive industries. It aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of WHR's value proposition in carbon-constrained industrial operations. A novel, data-driven, and design-agnostic assessment tool is developed to evaluate the performance of different WHR technologies across diverse industrial contexts. This tool accounts for key factors such as heat-source and heat-product stream temperatures, energy tariffs, investment costs, and displaced emissions. A multi-objective optimisation framework is also introduced to examine trade-offs between investment costs and emissions reductions. Furthermore, the thesis assesses three industrial integration schemes in the context of olefins production facilities. A cross-country analysis of these schemes, incorporating variations in climate, energy prices, and technical factors, suggests emissions reductions of up to 250 ktCO2(eq.) per year, with attractive marginal abatement costs leading to payback periods of 2–8 years. Additionally, a comparative analysis of four other waste heat-driven decarbonisation pathways for high-pressure steam generation was conducted for the same five countries. Decision-support maps are developed to illustrate the environmental and economic performance of these options under varying industrial conditions and international energy market scenarios. The results indicate that access to cleaner and more affordable electricity significantly enhances the viability of WHR for decarbonising hard-to-abate industrial thermal demands. Also, the thesis identifies critical barriers to WHR adoption through expert consultation. A total interpretive structural model is employed to map the interdependencies among nine key barriers, revealing that regulatory hurdles (e.g., permitting and policy constraints) and system-level competition with alternative solutions exert the most significant influence.
Version
Open Access
Date Issued
2024-12-16
Date Awarded
2025-04-01
Copyright Statement
Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC)
License URL
Advisor
Markides, Christos
Publisher Department
Department of Chemical Engineering
Publisher Institution
Imperial College London
Qualification Level
Doctoral
Qualification Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)