Paper Title
Economic Analysis of Fuel Production From Alkene Oligomerization

Abstract
As global energy and oil demand rises, the present petroleum reserves will last only up to 50 years. Hence, there is an urgency to develop alternative production routes for the fuel products, and these are becoming more and more economically attractive. In this respect, synthetic fuels created from alkene oligomerizations offer an alternative to the traditional fuel supply. This study discusses the economic analysis of fuel productions from ethylene and hexene oligomerization; the plants were designed to produce gasoline (C5-onward) and/or LPG (C3-C4). Three different oligomerization processes of which two types of reactors were utilized, including ethylene in a continuous flow fixed-bed reactor (CFBR) compared with hexene in CFBR and a continuous stirred tank reactor (CSTR) are carried out in 5,000 kg reactor. The results indicate that about 303,000and 575,000kg/year of LPG and gasoline can be produced from 1,008,000kg/year ethylene. About 2,693,000kg/year hexene, which are fed in CFBR and CSTR, can produce 2,340,000and 2,600,000kg/year of gasoline, respectively. Economic analysis indicates that three different annual operating costs for the plants are ฿42 million in E-CFBR, ฿137million in H-CFBR and ฿155million in H-CSTR. The plants, despite upfront capital investments (฿24 million), were estimated to be profitable business ventures. The proposed productions were compared using economic indexes such as the net present value (NPV), the internal rate of return (IRR) and the payback period (PBP) based on the proposed productions. The findings indicated that a H-CSTR, which is the most profitable, shows PBP of 1.9months with highest positive NPV of 416million baht and IRR of 71.8%, assuming the plants operate for 20 years at a 7% annual discount rate. Keywords- Oligomerization, Economic Analysis, Alkene