Safety, health, environmental and economic (SHEE) assessment of fertilizer production

Abstract

Safety, health, environmental and economic (SHEE) assessment of a chemical process can be done either during process design stage or on existing plant. Although SHEE assessment during process design stage is more challenging due to the limited data availability, early assessment is advantageous as it provides more freedom for engineers to make process modification at lower cost rather than at later stages. Besides, considering SHEE earlier when developing a new plant may result in a more cost efficient, more controllable as well as environmentally friendlier and inherently safer and healthier process. This paper presents SHEE assessment for fertilizer production based on chemical routes. The safety, health and environmental assessment using Inherent Benign-ness Index (IBI) and Inherent Chemical Process Properties Data is demonstrated using ammonium nitrate and ammonium sulphate production as the case study. Both methods agree with each other that the chemical route for ammonium nitrate is inherently more benign than the ammonium sulphate production. The economic assessment based on gross profit analysis reveals that ammonium nitrate production is more profitable compared to the production of ammonium sulphate. This framework enables economic and SHE comparison for different chemical routes to help identify the most sustainable process at cost competitive.