Through more than two decades' intensive research, ionic liquids (ILs) have exhibited significant potential in various areas of research at laboratory scales. This suggests that ILsbased industrial process development will attract increasing attention in the future. However, there is one core issue that stands in the way of commercialisation: the high cost of most laboratory-synthesized ILs will limit application to small-scale, specialized processes. In this work, we evaluate the economic feasibility of two ILs synthesized via acid-base neutralization using two scenarios for each: conventional and intensification processing. Based upon our initial models, we determined the cost price of each IL and compared the energy requirements of each process option. The cost prices of triethylammonium hydrogen sulfate and 1-methylimidazolium hydrogen sulfate are estimated as $1.24/kg and $2.96-5.88/kg, respectively. This compares favourably with organic solvents such as acetone or ethyl acetate, which sell for $1.30-$1.40/kg. Moreover, the raw materials contribute the overwhelming majority of this cost and the intensified process using a compact plate reactor is more economical due to lower energy requirements. These results indicate that ionic liquids are not necessarily expensive, and therefore large-scale IL-based processes can become a commercial reality. IntroductionIonic liquids (ILs) have been generating rising interest over the last two decades with a diversified range of applications. There are a number of properties which make ILs attractive both in academic and industrial fields. For example, they generally exhibit very low vapour pressures under ambient conditions, which also leads to most ILs being non-flammable and reduces exposure risk. Therefore, much of the interest of ILs has centred on the use of these solvents as alternatives to volatile organic solvents. Moreover, ILs are claimed to be 'designer solvents' 1 based upon their being composed of two distinct parts, resulting in a synthetic flexibility that is not available for single component molecular solvents. Consequently, ILs have been applied in a broad range of areas, such as fuel cells, batteries, capacitors, thermal fluids, plasticizers, lubricants and solvents in analysis, synthesis and catalysis 1-3 and more recently in separations (for example, carbon capture). [4][5][6] Despite all of these advantages and potential applications, ILs currently suffer from clear and significant disadvantages that stand in the way of many commercial applications. Most significant and frequently cited among these is the high cost of most ILs. For example, ILs have been applied as solvents for a biomass deconstruction process which is believed to be a nascent pre-treatment technology and holds great promise. 7-9Klein-Marcuschamer et al. 10 have conducted techno-economic analysis of this ILs-based biomass pre-treatment process, and report that in order to make this process a practical reality, three key factors should be addressed: reducing IL cost, reducing IL load...
Recently, acidic ionic liquid water mixtures based on the hydrogen sulfate anion have been shown to effectively extract lignin from lignocellulosic biomass.
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