Partial Carbon Capture by Absorption Cycle for Reduced Specific Capture Cost

Abstract

For a sustainable-energy system, the industrial carbon emission should be zero or close to it. The partial capture of CO2, i.e., capturing only a share of the CO2, is discussed as an option for initiating the transition toward the decarbonization of industry by reducing the CO2 mitigation cost at industrial sites. This work models two approaches to achieving partial capture based on amine absorption: (1) capturing 90% CO2 from a split stream of the flue gas or (2) capturing less CO2 (≪90%) from the total flue-gas flow. A techno-economic analysis is carried out that considers scale, CO2 concentration, and process configurations (absorber intercooling and rich solvent splitting) when comparing the cost of partial capture to full capture, i.e., capturing close to all CO2 from the entire gas. Besides lowering absolute costs, the study shows that partial capture from CO2-rich gases may also lower specific cost (€ per tonne of CO2 captured) compared to full capture, despite the economy of scale, during certain market conditions. Operating expenditures, especially the cost of steam, are found to be dominating cost factors for partial capture, even for capture down to 200 000 tonnes per year.

Marginal Abatement Cost Curve of Industrial CO2 Capture and Storage – A Swedish Case Study

“…The effect on the capture cost by being able to fully exclude new steam generation capacity is illustrated by the cost for partial capture, which is the amount of CO 2 possible to capture by using excess heat (Biermann et al, 2018). This allows for more significant capture cost reductions, as also shown in Figure 2 (see blue line).…”

“…Although, the investment is a considerable share of the total CO 2 capture cost, the cost of steam is generally the dominating cost item. As discussed by Biermann et al (2018), the steam cost depends on the current plant energy system, e.g., the amount of excess heat available, access to a steam cycle, and capacity of the present steam generation equipment. The cost of steam will also depend on energy market conditions and different steam generation options may be favored over time or dependent on time of the year or day.…”

Roadmap for Decarbonization of the Building and Construction Industry—A Supply Chain Analysis Including Primary Production of Steel and Cement

“…The main options for deep emission reduction in primary steel production are electrification with renewable electricity (either via hydrogen direct reduction or through electrowinning) [22,26,71,90,[115][116][117], use of biomass to replace coke as fuel and reducing agent [26,76,113,[118][119][120][121][122], and/or use of carbon capture and storage (CCS) [22,26,40,117,123,124]. Partial CO 2 capture is a mature and low-cost technology that can be implemented in the coming 10-15 years without major changes to the existing process and which can be combined with biomass substitution [123,125,126].…”

Carbon Allocation in Multi-Product Steel Mills That Co‐process Biogenic and Fossil Feedstocks and Adopt Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage Technologies

“…The choice of BFG over flue gases as the source of CO 2 for partial capture is advantageous in the techno-economic sense due to the higher CO 2 partial pressures (Sundqvist et al, 2018;Biermann et al, 2019) and the absence of oxygen (Dreillard et al, 2017) in the BFG. Near-term efforts will focus on partial CO 2 capture from one or a few stacks, to minimize the absolute and specific (per tCO 2 -captured) costs by avoiding the high integration costs linked to having several stacks and to utilize excess heat as a low-cost heat source (Ali et al, 2018;Biermann et al, 2018Biermann et al, , 2019. As of June 2020, globally, one CCUS project involving steel mill offgases utilizes 0.8 MtCO 2 annually for enhanced oil recovery in Abu Dhabi (Global CCS Institute, 2019), and one CCS project ("3D") is in early development in France (Dreillard et al, 2017;Birat, 2020; CORDIS, 2020) with a potential capacity of ∼1.5 MtCO 2 to be stored annually.…”

“…There is also competition between sectors for renewable biomass and electricity. Given the urgency of climate change and that many of the existing industrial processes will not be immediately made carbon-neutral via breakthrough technologies or shutdown, there is a need to implement a combination of already available technologies for partial mitigation, for example, fuel shifting to biomass and the application of CCS (Biermann et al, 2018;Berghout et al, 2019;Mandova et al, 2019).…”