Abstract
Hydrogen production process is one of the most coveted today, thanks to its multiple uses in the industry. It can be obtained through various methods, such as: electrolysis, reforming, biological methods and gasification. The production of hydrogen by this generations method begins with a natural gas feed stream, which requires a series of treatments where process equipment with associated an energy consumption is usually implemented. In addition, effluents, such as combustion waste gases, unreacted compounds, among others, are emitted into the environment. In the order to carry out the global analysis the hydrogen generation process, a simulation software was implemented, which allowed us to obtain operation process data. These processes usually tend to have certain impacts on the environment; In order to analyze this, an environmental assessment was executed in the WARGUI software that uses the waste reduction algorithm to quantify the total environmental impacts generated and outputted in the Hydrogen unit in two different topologies, the first is based on the actual configuration of a unit in a Latin American refinery where an external energy source is not needed because the residual combustion gases of the reformer are used in steam generation and heating other streams, for this the environmental analysis was carried out with two case studies. The second on is a hypothetical configuration in which 4 case studies were made, including a variation in the energy source. For both topologies 8 impact categories were evaluated.
