This contribution is concerned with the energy optimal process design for ethylene glycol synthesis. A systematic approach is developed based on the optimization of a general network model. A rigorous non-isothermal model for different network constituents is derived. These constituents are a two-phase reactor condenser element and several mixer/splitters with which the elements are connected to form the network superstructure. As one special case the resulting superstructure includes a process scheme commonly used in industries where reaction and separation are carried out in different devices. A second special case is a reactive distillation column recently proposed in literature. The general reactor network model is optimized by nonlinear programming (NLP) methods in order to obtain an energy minimal network configuration.