Abstract
Reducing the CO2 emissions from energy production sector as well as from other energy-intensive industrial applications (e.g. metallurgy, cement, chemistry etc.) is of great importance today. Carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) technologies are under development to be implemented in fossil fuel-based industrial applications to reduce the carbon footprint. The main aim of this paper is to present, through illustrative coal-based examples, the CO2 capture technologies used to reduce the carbon footprint of energy-intensive processes. The assessments are focused on conceptual design, modelling and simulation, process integration and technical and environmental assessment of CO2 capture with potential applications in industrial sectors with high greenhouse gas emissions e.g. power generation, metallurgy, cement, chemicals.
Two reactive gas-liquid and gas-solid carbon capture technologies are evaluated through illustrative industrial size examples. The CO2 capture rate is set to 90 %. Various coal-based processes were considered as illustrative examples e.g. combustion, gasification, cement production, integrated steel mill, coal to chemicals etc. The proposed conceptual designs were modelled and simulated using process flow modelling software ChemCAD. The mass and energy balances as well as the thermal integration tools were used to quantify the key technical and environmental performance indicators (e.g. fuel consumption, overall energy efficiency, carbon capture rate, energy penalty for CO2 capture, specific CO2 emissions etc.). The integrated assessments show that CCUS technologies have significant advantages in reducing the environmental impact of energy-intensive industrial applications e.g. cutting the specific CO2 emissions by about 60 - 90 %.
