Vinyl chloride monomer by the balanced EDC process (direct chlorination and oxygen-based oxychlorination)

Sourced conceptual inventory per tonne of VCM: ethylene, chlorine, fuel, steam and power from EU LVOC BREF ranges, oxygen and residues from stoichiometry, vent CO2 and combustion CH4 from IPCC 2006. No flowsheet; not reviewed.

Calculation maturity: not assessedDesign maturity: Concept (research)Not independently reviewedChlorinated organicsReport a problem with this process
Research outputNot engineering advice and not an approved design: do not use it for construction, operation or safety decisions. What this means

Sourced conceptual inventory per tonne of VCM: ethylene, chlorine, fuel, steam and power from EU LVOC BREF ranges, oxygen and residues from stoichiometry, vent CO2 and combustion CH4 from IPCC 2006. No flowsheet; not reviewed.

Capacity
per tonne of vinyl chloride monomer (the dataset's basis); no plant size

What goes in and out

In

  • EthyleneFeedstocklinked to ethylene-1 (lca/mappings.yaml)
  • ChlorineFeedstocklinked to chlor-alkali-1 (lca/mappings.yaml); EDC/VCM units are usually integrated with chlorine production
  • OxygenFeedstockoxygen-based oxychlorination; linked to asu-1 GOX (lca/mappings.yaml)
  • MethaneFeedstocknatural gas to the EDC cracker furnaces, taken as pure methane (ASSUMED)
  • AirFeedstockcombustion air of the furnaces and the vent treatment, free; its O2 is feed:O2
  • WaterFeedstockASSUMED: the effluent less the water formed by oxychlorination

Out

Utilities: Electricity, Steam (counted as heat delivered, gross of heat recovery)

Show in the process graph

Life cycle assessment

No footprint assessed yet; the process is part of the life-cycle inventory below.

In the open LCI database (cheme-as-code-atlas-preview-a3c52e4) as Vinyl chloride monomer Preliminary.

Download it for Brightway, openLCA and other tools.

In the LCI database: system model, datasets and KPIs against the benchmarks

In the LCI database

Status
Preliminary 5 unmapped exchanges. Some exchanges have no background mapping yet: they are exported unlinked and count no burden, so the inventory is incomplete.
System model
attributional, cut-off (methodology 1.1.0)
Allocation
mass (single-output, from default) · product:vinyl-chloride 100 %
Allocation findings
none
Change report
Not available: this build has no change report against an earlier release.
Dataset pages
Vinyl chloride monomer Preliminary

KPI benchmark positions

KPIValueReference rangePosition
Direct CO2 (furnaces, vent treatment, process vent) per t of VCM– t/t0.294 to 0.294 t/t
IPCC (2006) 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories, Vol. 3 Industrial Processes and Product Use, ch. 3 Chemical Industry Emissions (government)
not evaluated
Ethylene consumption per t of VCM– kg/kg0.47 to 0.47 kg/kg
IPCC (2006) 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories, Vol. 3 Industrial Processes and Product Use, ch. 3 Chemical Industry Emissions (government)
not evaluated
Oxygen consumption per t of VCM (oxygen-based oxychlorination)– kg/kg0.13 to 0.14 kg/kg
Falcke, H. et al. (2017) Best Available Techniques (BAT) Reference Document for the Production of Large Volume Organic Chemicals. JRC Science for Policy Report EUR 28882 EN, doi:10.2760/77304 (bref)
not evaluated
Light and heavy residues of EDC/VCM purification per t of VCM– kg/t20 to 62 kg/t
Falcke, H. et al. (2017) Best Available Techniques (BAT) Reference Document for the Production of Large Volume Organic Chemicals. JRC Science for Policy Report EUR 28882 EN, doi:10.2760/77304 (bref)
not evaluated

Maturity and review

Design maturity Concept (claimed): An idea or first flowsheet; numbers are rough. No independent engineering review yet. Automated checks passing is not a review.

Calculation maturity, from the checked evidenceNot assessed

The process has no maturity report (cheme maturity, checks/maturity.json), so no calculation maturity is established.

No level shownThe design maturity (Concept) is the manifest's claim, not evidence. A level appears here once the process's repository holds a current report from cheme maturity --write.

Artifact completeness

Which deliverables exist. They never raise a calculation maturity level: a drawing from unchecked numbers is still unchecked.

Not reported without a maturity report.

Independent review

Not independently reviewed

No independent engineering review yet. Automated checks passing is not a review.

Set by people only. Reaching a calculation maturity level or passing automated checks is not an independent review or an approval.

Where the evidence comes from
Report
processes/vcm-1/checks/maturity.json (not in the library)
Method
How ChemE-as-Code checks the levels (requirement by requirement)

Open items

0 open items · 0 closed

New action itemNew engineering holdNew technical queryNew design changeAll issues

Sources

Library version
a3c52e4 (process last changed in a3c52e4)
Data
Catalog record (JSON) · CC-BY-4.0
Files
View the files on GitHub · change history and authors

References

How to cite

For the data, cite the Process Atlas paper; for the platform that builds and checks it, the ChemE-as-Code paper.

Schweidtmann, A. M. & Weber, J. M. (2026, in preparation). Process Atlas: an open, git-native, reproducible library and life cycle inventory of chemical processes (working title).

For this process: "Vinyl chloride monomer by the balanced EDC process (direct chlorination and oxygen-based oxychlorination)", ChemE-as-Code process library, version a3c52e4.

BibTeX
@unpublished{schweidtmann_process_atlas,
  author = {Schweidtmann, Artur M. and Weber, Jana M.},
  title = {{Process Atlas: an open, git-native, reproducible library and life cycle inventory of chemical processes (working title)}},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://atlas.cheme-as-code.org},
  note = {in preparation}
}

Schweidtmann, A. M. (2026). ChemE-as-Code: An Open-Source Platform for Agentic AI in Chemical Engineering. arXiv:2611.07947. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2611.07947

BibTeX
@misc{schweidtmann_cheme_as_code,
  author = {Schweidtmann, Artur M.},
  title = {{ChemE-as-Code: An Open-Source Platform for Agentic AI in Chemical Engineering}},
  year = {2026},
  eprint = {2611.07947},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  doi = {10.48550/arXiv.2611.07947},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07947}
}