Chemical recycling of carbon dioxide emissions from a cement plant into dimethyl ether, a case study of an integrated process in France using a Reverse Water Gas Shift (RWGS) step

• We simulated an integrated process for hydrogenation of CO2 emissions into fuel.
• The simulation are based on a real case of a cement plant.
• An innovative catalyst is proposed for the RWGS reaction.

Recycling of carbon dioxide (CO2) and hydrogen (H2) into liquid fuel technology has recently gained wide public interest since it is a potential pathway to increase the liquid fuel supply and to mitigate CO2 emissions simultaneously.In France, the majority of the electricity production is derived from nuclear and renewable energy which have a low CO2 footprint. This electricity power enables a potential for massive hydrogen production with low carbon emissions.We studied the possibility to develop this technology at an industrial scale in the French context on a typical industrial example of a cement manufacture in the south of France.An integrated process is proposed, which enables the use of the heat released by the CO2 to fuel process to help to capture the CO2 released by the cement manufacture. Some technological issues are discussed, and a potential solution is proposed for the catalyst used in the critical step of the Reverse Water Gas-Shift reaction (RWGS) of the process.