Electrically heated ethane cracker (Linde/BASF/SABIC STARBRIDGE concept)

The same ethane-to-ethylene thermal cracking chemistry as ethane-cracker, but with the furnace's radiant-coil heating supplied by an electric heater instead of a fuel-gas-fired one -- the real distinguishing feature of Linde's STARBRIDGE technology (demonstrated at industrial scale with BASF and SABIC at Ludwigshafen, 2024): resistive heating elements replace burners, transferring heat to the process coils by radiation 'in a configuration similar to conventional furnaces,' eliminating the furnace's own combustion-derived CO2 emissions (upstream grid emissions aside). Modeled here as a plain electric heater node (no fuel-gas inlet, no flue gas, no combustion stoichiometry) in place of fired_heater's combustion-fired duty -- the honest difference this technology actually is: identical process-side thermal duty and cracking chemistry, a different (electric) heat source with no direct-combustion byproduct stream. Linde's own proprietary heating-element/coilbox design, materials, and thermal efficiency figures are not published and are not fabricated here; the furnace's computed duty is a genuine energy-balance result (electric heater -> real Q required to bring the feed to cracking temperature), not a marketing number.