Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

Carbon dioxide (CO2) capture from coal-fired power plants has been identified as one of the key strategies that will enable Canada and other nations to significantly reduce their emissions to the levels where Kyoto Protocol's targets can be achieved. However, adopting the CO2 capture technology to the power plants poses significant challenges because the absorption-based CO2 capture process requires significant energy requirement for solvent regeneration and CO2 stripping, thereby making this process energy intensive and costly. To alleviate such challenges, we propose a new process for energy-efficient CO2 stripping using alcohol vapor as a carrier instead of water vapor. This process presents a great opportunity for a significant reduction in energy requirement since it is operated at the temperature lower than that of the conventional process. This would enable the power plants to make use of their low-quality steam or any other low-quality energy sources locally available with no or small additional costs. As a result, more efficient heat integration between power plants and CO2 capture process can be achieved, consequently reducing energy penalty. It is therefore our goal to explore the promise of this new process by studying detailed fundamentals of alcohol-based CO2 stripping, evaluating energy performance, developing the most energy-efficient process scheme, identifying the most efficient approach for heat integration with the power plants, and also evaluating benefits and societal issues against the conventional process. To achieve these objectives, we plan to recruit five graduate students to be trained and undertake five tasks; 1) performance evaluation of mass-transfer, 2) development of rate-based CO2 stripping model, 3) development of energy-efficient process scheme, 4) corrosion evaluation and material selection, and 5) impact assessment of alcohol utilization. The outcomes of this proposed research are expected to contribute a great deal to Canada's climate change policy through the reduction in CO2 capture cost, thus providing an economic incentive to major industry to treat its flue gas before releasing it to the atmosphere.