The TEES Gas and Fuels Research Center and the Texas A&M Energy Institute will host a special joint seminar on energy featuring Dr. Guiyan Zang, a research scientist at the MIT Energy Initiative, will be held on Tuesday, March 21, 2023, from 9:30 a.m. – 10:30 a.m. CST (UTC -6:00) in the Jack E. Brown Chemical Engineering Building room 106. The topic will be “Life-Cycle and Techno-Economic Analysis: Synthetic-Fuel Production and Other Applications.”
Abstract
Life-cycle analysis (LCA) and techno-economic (TEA) analysis can examine emissions, cost, benefits, risks, uncertainties, and timeframes of energy technologies. This presentation will introduce the life cycle and techno-economic analysis results of synthetic-fuel production and other applications. The first part estimates the production cost and CO2reduction potential of synthetic methanol and Fischer–Tropsch (FT) fuels. The synthetic fuel is produced by using CO2captured from the waste streams emitted from six industrial [ethanol, ammonia, natural gas (NG) processing, hydrogen, cement, and iron/steel production plants] and two power generation (coal and NG) processes across the United States (U.S.). The second part introduces more cases to show the practical applications of LCA and TEA analysis for lab-scale experimental scale-up, novel process design, and industrial decarbonization. The cases include biofuel production, campus building cooling/heating/electricity tri-generation, and iron and steel industrial decarbonization.
Biography
Dr. Guiyan Zang is a research scientist at the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI), where her research includes techno-economic analysis (TEA) and life cycle analysis (LCA) on ammonia production and application, clean hydrogen and ethylene production, bio-methanol production, and carbon capture for hard-to-abate industries. Before MIT, she spent three years working for Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) as a postdoctoral scholar and then as an energy system analyst. At ANL, her research was energy conversion system design, TEA, and LCA, in particular, decarbonization for industrial processes, synthetic fuel/chemicals production, and waste material conversions. She developed the e-fuel pathways in GREET software and earned two Impact Argonne Awards. She holds a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Iowa, Iowa, U.S.