Economic aspects energy cost

Thermal and catalytic incinerators, condensers, and adsorbers are the most common methods of abatement used, due to their ability to deal with a wide variety of emissions of organic compounds. The selection between destruction and recovery equipment is normally based on the feasibility of recovery, which relates directly to the cost and the concentration of organic compounds in the gas stream. The selection of a suitable technology depends on environmental and economical aspects, energy demand, and ease of installation as well as considerations of operating and maintenance. 7 he selection criteria may vary with companies or with individual process units however, the fundamental approach is the same. 

Economic Aspects. As of 1995, two manufacturers produced sodium thiosulfate in the United States with an estimated total capacity of 30,000 metric tons. Despite declining volume, prices have increased, reflecting increased taw material, energy, and labor costs. Production outside of the United States is at least 25%i of the U.S. production, mainly in Germany. 

A topical aspect of differential inflation is the question of energy costs. Will the cost of a particular fuel rise or fall in relation to prices in general, and if so, what effect will this have on the economics of a project ... 

Life-cycle analysis (LCA) does not account for economic aspects, and such analysis should therefore be considered together with a life-cycle cost analysis (LCC), which takes into account the costs of investment, energy, maintenance, and dumping the final waste product throughout the lifetime of a plant. 

A further improvement in the sustainability of an industrial production process may be achieved by closing the water loops for a number of adjacent industrial production processes. This may be achieved in a so-called eco-industrial area where the primary aim is to arrange industrial production processes in such a way that water, wastes, materials, and energy can be exchanged between the various production processes in an environmentally sustainable and cost effective manner. A shared process water production plant and wastewater treatment plant is then a crucial step. It will, however, be clear that such an approach requires a thorough and detailed study which incorporates not only technical and economical aspects but also legal, organisational and infrastructural aspects as well. 

Thermodynamic and economic aspects of the preceding evolutionary rules can be illustrated by translating them into a set of basic on-diagram modifications (BODM), These modifications can be applied directly on a heat content diagram or temperature interval diagram for the systematic evolutionary synthesis of energy-optimum and minimum-cost networks. For... 

As the economic aspects are concerned, the overall costs, represented by the sum of capital costs, operating costs and maintenance have to be considered. For an electrochemical process, the operating costs are mainly determined by the energy consumption (CE). 

The opportunity for optimizing control of the converter arises, and the operator should then be able to select from the available operating conditions those which will maximize profits or minimize variable production costs. The performance-optimization program must therefore include an economic objective function which involves factors such as market, sales, product price, raw materials, and energy costs. So far as kinetic aspects are concerned, for any set of operating conditions considered by the model, the maximization of the total conversion obtainable with a given quantity of catalyst is then achieved using the method of by... 

Wind energy economics focuses on the fuel-saving aspects of this renewable resource, but capacity benefits and pollution reduction are important considerations as well. The capital costs are significant, hut there is no annual fuel cost as is associated with fossil fuel technologies. Thus, wind energy has been used... 

A first obvious consequence of such considerations is that we should not only look at the costs of the product from an economic point of view, but that we must consider the costs of the production process in a broader sense. We must take into account the raw materials used, the amount of energy invested and the possibility to design alternatives, more environmentally friendly processes. In other words, we should not only look at the desired product, but we must consider the total life cycle of the product The design of a production process taking into account these aspects is often referred to as integral life cycle management. 

Surveys and interviews show that the attention paid to energy-efficiency investments in companies, public administrations and private households is often very low and heavily influenced by the priorities of those responsible for decision making (Ramesohl, 2000 Schmid, 2004 Stern, 1992). In other cases, project-based economic evaluations do not consider the relatively high transaction costs of the investor and also the substantial risks involved in the case of long-term investments both aspects may be decisive for small efficiency investments (Ostertag, 2003). 

The interesting aspect here is that an aquatic biomass can furnish not only chemicals but also energy products. These chemicals may have a high added value (as in the case of astaxanthine or pigments), such that the costs of algal production are covered consequently, the process would be not only economically feasible but also energetically acceptable. 

For the establishment of the realistic limit, one has to take account of the rates of processes in which mass, heat, momentum, and chemical energy are transferred. In this so-called finite-time, finite-size thermodynamics, it is usually possible to establish optimal conditions for operating the process, namely, with a minimum, but nonzero, entropy generation and loss of work. Such optima seem to be characterized by a universal principle equiparti-tioning of the process s driving forces in time and space. The optima may eventually be shifted by including economic and environmental parameters such as fixed and variable costs and emissions. For this aspect, we refer to Chapter 13. 

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