Abstract
Selection of chemical process route at early stage is one of the major tasks during the R&D stage, which needs to be based on various criteria including economy, safety, health and environment (SHE). Various methods have been developed for inherent SHE assessment, but the question is; do the SHE properties correlate with each other at inherent level. In this paper, a study is conducted to determine the correlation between inherent SHE properties by applying six SHE assessment methods to three routes for benzene production - toluene hydrodealkylation (TDA), pyrolysis gasoline hydrogenation (pygas) and catalyticnaphtha reforming. Overall, the study reveals a low correlation between safety, health and environmental criteria with an average R2 value of 0.15. This poor correlation is contributed by fugitive emission aspect, which is included in health assessment and also due to the different assessment characteristics of SHEmethods such as catastrophic vs. normal operating and chronic vs. acute scenarios. Besides, it is believed that the selection of the case study, in which all the three routes have only single sub-process, has contributed to this poor correlation.
