Hitachi’s carbon dioxide scrubbing technology with new absorbent for coal fired power plants

Babcock Hitachi has been developing a new amine-based scrubbing technology for capturing carbon dioxide in the flue gas of coal-fired power plants. The development program includes testing of commercial and new combinations of absorbents and additives. More than thirty kinds of amines have been evaluated and characterized by both fundamental tests in the laboratory and slipstream pilot plant tests. The pilot plant tests of the CO2 scrubbing system were conducted at a coal-fired power plant in co-operation with Tokyo Electric Power Company. Two thousand hours of continuous operation was achieved with more than 90% CO2 reduction on average during the entire operation. Energy consumption with the original absorbent blend was much less than that with typical MEA. Since then the CO2 scrubbing system has been further advanced to reduce the energy consumption as well as absorbent degradation drastically by improving the amine-based absorbent in a bench-scale test facility. Pilot tests at Energy and Environmental Research Center (EERC), University of North Dakota, were conducted in 2010 and the test results indicated high performance of the improved amine-based absorbent, H3-1. This latest advanced solvent is also scheduled to be demonstrated in a large mobile test facility at several coal-fired power plants in Europe starting 2010. In parallel, conceptual designs of the CO2 scrubbing system for commercial plants up to 800 MWe in size are being developed.