LNG cold energy use in agro-food industry: A case study in Sicily

It is known how the complete gasification of liquefied natural gas (LNG) can return about 230 kWh/t of energy. Nevertheless out of fifty-one gasification plants in the world, only thirty-one of them are equipped with systems for the partial recovery of the available energy. At the moment most of these plants mainly produce electric energy; however the employment of the cold energy results very interesting, in fact, it can be recovered for agro-food transformation and conservation as well as for some loops in the cold chain. Cold energy at low temperatures requires high amounts of mechanical energy and it unavoidably increases as the required temperature diminishes. Cold energy recovery from LNG gasification would allow considerable energy and economic savings to these applications, as well as environmental benefits due to the reduction of climate-changing gas emissions. The task of this work is to assess the possibility to create around a gasification plant an industrial site for firms working on the transformation and conservation of agro-food products locally grown. The cold energy recovered from gasification would be distributed to those firms through an opportune liquid carbon dioxide network distribution capable of supplying “the cold” to the different facilities. A LNG gasification plant in a highly agricultural zone in Sicily would increase the worth of the agro-food production, lower transformation and conservation costs when compared to the traditional systems and bring economic and environmental benefits to the interested areas.