Alternative analysis of coal chemical products

With the continuous reduction of the world's oil resources and the acceleration of the industrialization process, the situation of the increasingly tight world oil supply has seriously restricted the development of China's economy, and the problem of energy security has become increasingly prominent. China's energy structure shows the distinctive characteristics of "rich coal, poor oil and less gas" energy resources, which determines the energy pattern of our country's long-term dependence on coal, and the resource endowment determines that our country must develop coal chemical industry.

Coal chemical industry can be divided into traditional coal chemical industry and new coal chemical industry according to its product types. The so-called modern coal chemical industry, that is, the new coal chemical technology and product production based on alternative energy and petrochemical products developed in recent years, such as coal-to-oil, olefin, dimethyl ether, natural gas, ethylene glycol and other coal-based alternative energy-oriented industries. Traditional coal chemical industry usually refers to coal to coke, calcium carbide, methanol and other industries with a long history and mature technology. It is of great strategic significance to develop new coal chemical industry, especially coal-based alternatives such as coal-to-oil and coal-to-olefin.

Due to the late start of modern coal chemical industry, the current market share is small, there is no pricing power in the market, so modern coal chemical industry will face external and petrochemical industry competition, internal competition with similar enterprises in the industry. On the other hand, in order to replace the traditional petrochemical industry, modern coal chemical industry is very difficult to investigate from the aspects of technology maturity, energy efficiency, environment, carbon emissions, resource consumption, economy, etc. In addition, China's coal-rich areas are generally short of water, and far from the market, coupled with traffic bottlenecks and fragile ecological environment, so that the pattern becomes extremely complicated. This report mainly tries to make a brief analysis of the substitution of new coal chemical products from the perspective of upstream and downstream products, technology and economy, so as to provide some reference for investors.

1. Coal to olefin: the process is mature and can be developed on a scale

Olefins are important organic basic raw materials, among which ethylene is one of the world's largest production of chemical products, ethylene industry is the core of the petrochemical industry, and propylene is used to produce a variety of important organic chemical raw materials, polypropylene, synthetic resins, synthetic rubber and a variety of fine chemicals. The main methods of olefin production include coal to olefin, methanol to olefin, propane dehydrogenation to alefin and naphtha to olefin. In addition, there are still in the research stage of synthesis gas to olefin, natural gas to olefin.

Coal to olefin mainly refers to the production of ethylene, propylene and their polymers through coal as raw materials. In simple terms, the technology can be divided into four core processes: coal gasification, syngas purification, methanol synthesis and methanol to olefin. Obviously, coal to methanol is the most important part of the process. First, coal is gasified to make syngas; Then the syngas is converted; Then the converted syngas is purified; At last, the purified syngas is made into crude methanol and distilled to produce qualified methanol.

Methanol to olefin (MTO) and methanol to propylene (MTP) are two important new C1 chemical processes, which refer to the chemical technology of producing low carbon olefin by using methanol synthesized from coal or natural gas as raw material and using fluidized bed reaction form similar to catalytic cracking unit. The representative MTO process technologies in foreign countries are mainly UOP/Hydro, ExxonMobil technology, and Lurgi MTP technology. China's earliest research units engaged in the development of MTO technology are mainly led by Dalian Compound Institute, and developed DMTO patented technology, overcome the world's first set of coal to low-carbon olefin process technology engineering and achieve long-term stable operation and other global problems, and jointly industrialized with Shenhua Group, built the world's first set of million tons of coal-based methanol to olefin large-scale industrialization demonstration equipment.

According to the notice of the National Development and Reform Commission on "Strengthening the construction management of coal chemical projects to promote the healthy development of the industry", "generally, coal-to-oil projects with a scale of less than 3 million t/year, methanol and dimethyl ether projects with a scale of less than 1 million t/year, and coal-to-olefin projects with a scale of less than 600,000 t/year should not be approved." Therefore, when doing economic analysis, this requirement standard is the basis of production scale.