Analyzing Structural Loss of Sustainable Distillation Process by Material Flow Cost Accounting

Nowadays, the use of fossil fuel is growing rapidly and forests are widely lost due to fires and logging. It means massive CO2 emissions and a decline in CO2 absorption capacity, and drives to the situation that people should recognize global warming as world issue. The SDGs and COP-FCCC are the efforts that gain attention from around the world. In Japanese industry, the chemical industry using large plants is expected to contribute to the problem. In particular, the distillation process consumes as much as 40% of the energy of all production processes. For profit-making companies, as the technological challenge, the quality of distillation process is improved to meet customer requirements while keeping costs down. There is not energy perspective. This study focuses on this point, and aims at a performance improvement of distillation process in the corroborative chemical company by adapting Material Flow Cost Accounting (MFCA), an environment accounting method. This study gets two results as follows: First, three types of distillation structures are classified by waste type. Second, the relationship between the composition ratio of products in distillation and energy performance was clarified. From this result, the course of improvement direction can be shown by changing the operating condition of distillation.