Are Water-lean Solvent Systems Viable for Post-Combustion CO2 Capture?

We present here an overview of water-lean solvents that compares their projected costs and performance to aqueous amine systems, emphasizing critical areas of study needed to evaluate their performance against their water-based brethren. The work presented here focuses on bridging these knowledge gaps. Because the majority of water-lean solvents are still at the lab scale, substantial studies are still needed to model and assess their performance at full scales. This presents a significant challenge as each formulation has different physical and thermodynamic properties and behavior, and quantifying how these different properties manifest themselves in conventional absorber-stripper configurations, or identifying new configurations that are specific for a solvent's signature behavior. We identify critical areas of study that are needed, and our efforts (e.g. custom infrastructure, molecular models) to predict, measure, and model these behaviors. Such findings are critical for determining the rheology required for heat exchanger design; absorber designs and packing to accommodate solvents with gradient changes (e.g. viscosity, contact angle, surface tension), and stripper configurations without direct steam utilization or water reflux. Another critical area of research need is to understand the molecular structure of the liquid interface and bulk as a function of CO2 loading, and to assess whether conventional film theories accurately quantify solvent behavior, or if thermodynamic models adequately quantify activity coefficients of ions in solution. We conclude with an assessment of our efforts to aid in bridging the knowledge gaps in understanding water-lean solvents, and suggestions of what is needed to enable large-scale demonstrations to meet the United States Department of Energy's goals.