Life Cycle Analysis for the Production of Urea through Syngas

Abstract

For optimum growth of the agriculture industry certain urea-based fertilizers are used to provide better Nitrogen content to the soil, but this growth comes with a cost in terms of carbon footprint. In this paper, life cycle assessment (LCA) is conducted for urea production having a minimum of 46% nitrogen content. For LCA, a fertilizer industry with 3850 MTPD urea production capacity is considered with an annual target of 1.27 MMTPA, while the functional unit is taken as 1MT of urea production. This paper is concerned about finding the MT equivalent CO2 required per MT urea production. The coal used for syngas preparation is from G9 to G14 meaning the gross calorific value (GCV) ranges from 4601 to 3400 GCV per kilocalories. The carbon footprint of catalyst is considered and showed its importance when it comes to larger production size. In this analysis, MT CO2equivalent per MT urea is 0.714and this result is also compared with the data of the developing countries.