Demonstration of advanced APBS solvent at TNO's CO₂ capture pilot plant

Abstract

The company Carbon Clean Solutions (CCS) has developed a variety of energy efficient solvents and processes such as PCCMax, which aim to reduce the overall operating and capital cost of CO2 capture. Highly successful R&D in collaboration with TNO, considering aspects from fundamental properties such as VLE and current work has been focused on developing energy efficient chemical solvents and addressing solvent management aspects such as solvent degradation, corrosion and emissions. CCS demonstrated their solvent technology at TNO's 6 MTPD (metric tons per day) CO2 capture pilot plant connected to a coalfired power plant from E.ON, Maasvlakte near Rotterdam. The advanced novel solvent APBS was compared with conventional solvents in terms of CO2 absorption capacity, energy, cyclic capacity and absorption kinetics over 1000 operation hours. This APBS solvent was specifically developed to capture CO2 from flue gas emissions from coal based power plants. This solvent system is based on an innovative combination of solvent components used to overcome the particular weaknesses of the state of art CO2 capture solvents. Useful performance data and operational experience was obtained for the continued development of the CCS's PCCMax technology. A well designed test plan was successfully executed during this testing period to obtain detailed solvent performance and optimization data. Importantly process data was collected to validate thermodynamic and process models. Thus, validated CCS simulation modelscan beused for the further scale up of the technology. This article provides general description of results and operating experiences in the areas of solvent handling, solvent performance which includes long term stability testing, energy demand, solvent degradation, corrosion and emissions testing as compared to benchmark solvent monoethanolamine (MEA) and CESAR1 solvent previously tested on same EON, Maasvlakte CO2 capture facility for 90% CO2 capture from power plant flue gas. Mainly focused on measuring overall regeneration energy, detailed metal content analysis (to predict the corrosivity), detailed overall oxidative and thermal degradation and gas emission characterization including aerosols and nitrosamine emissions. Energy consumption of the solvent system per ton of CO2 captured with a standard flowsheet is around 2.5 GJ per tonne of CO2. However, due to the solvent matrix novel flowsheet options can be used to further reduce energy consumption. Moreover, the solvent is compared to MEA at least a factor of 10 more stable. Next to that, aerosol based emission of the APBS solvent as compared to MEA is negligible. Details of the measurement campaign will be further elaborated in our contribution.