Taking into account environmental criteria in the design of a process: Application to steam methane reforming by performing a multi-objective techno-economic optimisation of the system

In the current context of sustainable development, industrial process development should no longer only take economic goals into account. Environmental criteria should be considered as well. Therefore, multi-objective optimisations should be carried out. A techno-economic model of steam methane reforming was implemented through the use of genetic algorithms. Different criteria can be then simultaneously considered. The optimisation result represents one objective versus the other: the hydrogen production cost and the carbon dioxide emissions of the process. This allows making compromises between the objectives. These compromises can be led either by regulations or by an overcost linked to taxes, for example.