Sustainable self-sufficient methanol village -

Abstract

The increase of the CO2 concentration in the air is causing a rise in the Earth temperature known as global warming, this phenomenon is expected to increase in the coming years due to the growth in power demand. On the other hand the main sources of energy today depend mainly on oil, gas and coal, which are being depleted. The prices of these resources are expected to rise compounded with further demand. The solution proposed in this thesis would be to use renewable energy from the sun in a desert area to produce energy. Thus this thesis investigates the technical and economic feasibility of creating a self-sufficient village in desert areas (North Africa or Middle East) to use decentralized solar energy and transform into a green energy product, methanol, which can be exported using existing transportation tanker systems. This system would involve several subsystems to desalinate water through reverse osmosis, then produce hydrogen through electrolysis, and green methanol to be exported. The system would harvest its energy from solar radiation or other renewable resources. The system would also need to support the community in terms of its vital needs for water and energy to be self-sufficient. In this thesis, the components of the system would be optimized in term of operation and sizing. Given the components’ sizes, the operation of the system is simulated using Simulink to produce methanol at the minimum possible cost using single-step dynamic programming (SSDP). Optimization of the hybrid power source is implemented in the simulation. The components’ optimum sizing of this hybrid system is obtained using the ordinal optimization (OO) technique. The best cost we obtained to produce green methanol using this proposed method was higher than methanol market cost, usually obtained from fossil fuels. Further investigation was made to show how carbon credit and other factors can play role in increasing the value of green methanol to have an economical and profitable system. In addition to reducing the