Decision Making for Sustainable Product Development: The Net-Zero Ecosystem for Ethylene Production

Carbon capture and utilization technologies (CCUt) offer a promising route to reducing emissions from the chemical sector, yet large-scale deployment remains hindered by complex decisions involving technology maturity, economic feasibility, product life cycles, and supply chain integration. While techno-economic assessment (TEA) and life-cycle assessment (LCA) are widely applied to evaluate emerging CCUt, they rarely account for nonquantifiable deployment barriers such as policy uncertainty, regulatory alignment, and supply-chain maturity at early stages of development. This study addresses this gap by proposing an integrated decision-making framework that combines TEA, LCA, and a structured qualitative risk assessment to support early-stage screening and comparison of CCU-based ethylene production pathways under high uncertainty. The framework is demonstrated through a case study of ethylene production via electrocatalytic utilization of high- and low-purity CO2 streams from industrial flue gases within the United Kingdom context. Results show that CCU-derived ethylene can substantially reduce product carbon footprints across multiple life-cycle impact categories, with outcomes strongly influenced by feedstock quality, allocation choices, energy prices, and policy strategies. High-grade CO2, including biogenic sources, improves economic and environmental outcomes, achieving net zero emissions and a levelled cost of approximately 2.39 ± 0.34 USD kg−1 under optimistic assumptions. Although roughly 14% costlier than high-grade CO2, post-combustion streams combined with CO−CO2 utilization can yield net negative carbon footprints. Across scenarios, total emissions can be offset by 57−110% depending on supply-chain configuration (such as feedstock grade, allocation methods governing benefit, and burden sharing between CO2 suppliers and users). Process improvements should prioritize energy efficiency, productivity, byproduct recovery, and the reduction of on-site emissions. To translate these performance ranges into deployment, tax incentives, premium pricing, and emission-related charges emerge as effective policy levers for economic viability, with outcomes sensitive to different market conditions. By integrating quantitative performance metrics with qualitative deployment risks, the proposed framework enabled transparent comparison of CCUt. Uncertainties regarding regulatory frameworks (e.g., certification and feedstock quality), data quality for scale-up, waste management practices for byproduct recovery, and supply chain level enablers were identified as key-challenges for industrial deployment.