Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) has been identified as one of the key measures for the mitigation of greenhouse gases emissions in Canada. This is especially important in Western Canada where the impacts of the Kyoto protocol could otherwise be severe. The economical removal of carbon dioxide is also vital to the sustainable development of Canada's coal and oil reserves.  There is a worldwide interest in finding new sources of carbon dioxide for enhanced oil recovery. Using present day technology, even when CO2 can be sold as a by-product (enhanced oil recovery), the capture of carbon dioxide is economically attractive only when the oil price is high. The proposed research study has as a first objective to screen new promising polyamines. These amines will be tested in terms of their cyclic capacity and rates of reaction with CO2. The selected amines should be much better solvents than those presently used in the gas, petrochemical, and power generation industries. The main disadvantage of these amines is their partial solubility in water. A study of the solubility of these amines in water and in other potential physical solvents (alcohol, glycols...) should provide some solutions to this dilemma. Even though amines have been used in industry for decades, they remain very poorly understood in terms of their interactions with CO2 and water. The last portion of the solubility/kinetics research proposal deals with a solubility study of carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, methane and ethane in selexol?, a very successful commercial mixture of physical solvents. The second objective of this research proposal is to study these interactions by measuring the density, viscosity, surface tension of the aqueous solutions, and try to interpret the results in terms of the intermolecular interactions. A computational chemistry software will also be used to calculate some properties of these amines and help direct the screening solubility study in order to save money and time.