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In the pharma and fine chemical industries, the development of continuous flow technologies is a process intensification step of primary importance towards the manufacturing of high-quality products, while reducing the environmental impact and cost of production. The sustainability and profitability of a process can be measured through life cycle Assessment and cost evaluation. However, when applied to emerging technologies, these need to be performed at different stages of the process development in order to limit the uncertainties arising from the scale-up, and hence providing high-fidelity projections of environmental impacts and costs at larger scales. The output of the assessment can in fact vary significantly depending on the maturity of the technology and this translates into having different results at commercial scale compared to early estimations. Therefore, in this article, we perform an assessment at two different scales of production, lab and mini-pilot scale, with the aim of quantifying the uncertainties of the assessment related to the scale-up, identifying the hotspots of the system, and hence providing guidelines for the further steps of process development. The subject of the assessment is the continuous flow synthesis of Rufinamide. It is the first time that this synthesis is evaluated at pilot-scale. The results show that low yields in the cycloaddition drastically affect the waste management and the production of precursors, and hence increases environmental impacts and cost of production. This calls for the need of prioritizing the optimization of this synthesis step in order to deploy a green and economically competitive production technology.

Bio-substitute natural gas (or bio-SNG) produced from gasification of waste fuels and subsequent methanation of the product gas could play a crucial role in the decarbonisation of heating and transportation, and could be a vital part of the energy mix in the coming decades. Although the methanation of trace quantities of carbon oxides has been practiced commercially for many years, methanation from syngas poses a more severe problem due to the high and unstable concentrations of reactants in the produced gas. In this work, a low-Ni methanation catalyst was tested in a differential reactor to derive a kinetic model that could determine a practical operating scheme for the first methanation step of a typical bio-SNG process. The model, comprising water gas shift and methanation reactions, along with their reverse reactions, was used for realistic modelling of the methanation process using high quality syngas, obtained from steam-oxygen gasification of wastes and gas plasma conversion, and to better determine the operation conditions in the first reactor of a bio-SNG pilot plant in Swindon (UK). The tests undertaken show that the catalyst was performing as expected using the waste-derived syngas at industrially relevant conditions, when compared to predictions of models derived from works using bottled gases. This gives confidence that the same approach can be used for the detailed design and operation of once through methanation reactor elements and process system configuration for bio-SNG production at larger scale.