Development of Partial Oxy-combustion Technology: New Solvents Applied to CO2 Capture in Fossil-fuels Power Plants

Carbon Capture and Storage Technologies (CCS) applied to fossil-fuels power plants have shown some issues that has not been solved yet. Post-combustion using amine-based chemical absorption is a mature and industrially developed technology but the solvent regeneration requires a high-intensive energy consumption. On the other hand, oxy-combustion requires a large amount of high-purity oxygen that can only be supplied by cryogenics. Therefore, the oxygen production is its higher energy penalty. Partial oxy-combustion is a hybrid technology between both technologies that proposes an optimized operation that can lead to further reductions on the overall energy consumption. A comprehensive study of solvents applied in CO2 capture have been carried out under higher CO2 partial pressures. Two new solvents, namely HYBRID-1 and HYBRID-2 have been formulated and tested. Results extracted from the experiments with MEA have shown absorption improvements in higher CO2 concentrated flue gas cases in comparison with air-fired cases (15% v/v CO2). In particular, HYBRID-1 reported the most promising results in terms of equilibrium CO2 loading and CO2 absorption rate compared with MEA. HYBRID-1 have been considered as a potential solvent for partial oxy-combustion applications.