Carbon Dioxide Capture

CO₂ capture no longer refers just to removal of CO₂ from gases, post combustion in direct power generation.  CO₂ capture is now highly pertinent to:

• Post combustion CO₂ capture in power generation
• Production of blue hydrogen from methane for use as a fuel
• Conversion of waste to biomethane, among others

The intense interest in climate change and ways to mitigate it are driving significant, new, research and commercial development efforts in processes to remove CO₂ by absorption into aqueous and nonaqueous solvents.  It is also now a critical part of processes for producing blue hydrogen from methane via the water-gas shift reaction, and for the conversion of landfill gas, and animal and agricultural wastes to renewable methane (aka renewable natural gas).  Reigning technologies for post-combustion carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) and for blue hydrogen and renewable natural gas are all based on the absorption of CO₂ into solvents of one kind or another.  ProTreat excels at the simulation of CO₂ absorption.  Proposed solvents include:

• High-strength, corrosion-inhibited MEA (currently the industry benchmark)
• AMP (2-amino-2-methyl-1-propanol) alone or piperazine-promoted (MHI solvent KS-1^TM and CESAR-1)
• MDEA promoted with piperazine
• Amino acid salts such as sodium glycinate and potassium dimethyl glycinate
• Hot potassium carbonate, promoted with piperazine or other amines
• High concentration (40 wt%) piperazine
• Chilled ammonia (Alstom Power)

Learn more about proposed solvents here.

Because of the huge gas volumes involved, the sheer size of the resulting columns, and the need to minimize pressure drop, the only approach that makes sense is to use columns of large crimp structured packing. If reliance on gravity-driven flows can be replaced with the centrifugal force generated by rotation, then rotating packed beds become a possible alternative. Nevertheless, and regardless of scale, packing is undoubtedly the way gas-liquid contacting will be done.

ProTreat® is the only gas treating simulator capable of making the correct calculations for the mass transfer performance of packing. Its mass- and heat-transfer rate-based model uses tower internals details not just for hydraulic rating, but for doing detailed absorption and stripping rate calculations. Its ability to predict the separation using random and structured packing makes ProTreat extremely reliable in carbon capture applications. No residence times, no ideal stages, no translation to real packing — only information you can read from a PFD and internals vendor's drawings — lets ProTreat provide superior accuracy and confident prediction.

Pressure drop dictates that large-crimp structured packing will be used in CO₂ capture. A 500 MW power station (only ⅛^th the size of the world's largest coal-fired plant) would use 5,000 m³ of packing in a 25-m diameter column, in not an unusually-large generating station. Obviously, getting the mass transfer right can make a big difference even just in packing volume and capital cost. But it's even more important to get the solvent regeneration system right because that's where the bulk of the energy is consumed, and CCS requires a lot of energy no matter what the process!

ProTreat® simulation is used by many of the leading research groups in CCS and by many of the organizations currently building pilot-scale and full-scale carbon capture plants. It is the industry standard in this application. ProTreat is the industry's most advanced simulation tool for carbon capture studies. It turns your drawing-board design into a virtual plant.