Membranes for Carbon Dioxide Capture from Kuwait Power Stations:Process and Economic Analysis

Abstract

Power plants account for 42% of the total emitted carbon dioxide in Kuwait. To reduce global warming, it is necessary to capture carbon dioxide from the flue gas of power stations. In this paper, commercial polyethylene-oxide based membranes were simulated using a two-stage setup for the production of a stream containing 90 mol% of carbon dioxide. The compression and the vacuum systems were evaluated in this study in terms of the membrane area, flow of the captured carbon dioxide, power consumption, and capital investment. Results show that the compression system requires less membrane area but it was not economical due to the high energy requirement of the compressor. In the vacuum system, the membrane area increased by a fold of 30 but the energy consumption was reduced by 96%. It was concluded that the vacuum system reduced the capital cost by 63% in contrast with the compression system. Compared to other technologies such as amine scrubber and pressure swing adsorption, the vacuum membrane system can provide a very attractive solution for carbon dioxide separation with a capture cost of 30.1$ per ton.

Keywords

• Power station
• Flue gas
• Carbon dioxide capture
• Gas-separation membranes
• UniSim simulation

References

1. T. Volk, CO2 rising: the world's greatest environmental challenge: MIT Press, 2010.
2. E. Labrecque, Climate change: Cherry Lake Publishing, 2017.
3. J. Belbute and A. Pereira, "Reference forecasts for CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel combustion and cement production in Portugal," Energy Policy, vol. 144, p. 111642.
4. A. Al-Mutairi, A. Smallbone, S. Al-Salem, and A. Roskilly, "The first carbon atlas of the state of Kuwait," Energy, vol. 133, pp. 317-326.
5. J. Wijmans and R. Baker, "The solution-diffusion model: a review," J. Membr. Sci., vol. 107, pp. 1-21, 1995.
6. M. Jaschik, M. Tanczyk, J. Jaschik, and A. J.-C., "The performance of a hybrid VSA-membrane process for the capture of CO2 from flue gas," Int.J. Greenhouse Gas Control, vol. 97, pp. 103037, 2020.
7. A. Hussain and M.-B. Hägg, "A feasibility study of CO2 capture from flue gas by a facilitated transport membrane," J. Membr. Sci, vol. 359, pp. 140-148, 2010.
8. R. Khalilpour, K. Mumford, H. Zhai, A. Abbas, G. Stevens, and E. Rubin, "Membrane-based carbon capture from flue gas: a review," J. Cleaner Prod., vol. 103, pp. 286-300, 2015.

9. Z. Song, Y. Song, Y. Li, B. Bai, K. Song, and J. Hou, "A critical review of CO2 enhanced oil recovery in tight oil reservoirs of North America and China," Fuel, vol. 276, pp. 118006, 2020.
10. D. Simakov, Renewable synthetic fuels and chemicals from carbon dioxide: fundamentals, catalysis, design considerations and technological challenges: Springer International Publishing, 2017.
11. D. Sanders, Z. Smith, R. Guo, L. Robeson, J. McGrath, D. Paul, B. Freeman , "Energy-efficient polymeric gas separation membranes for a sustainable future: A review," Polymer, vol. 54, pp. 4729-4761, 2013.
12. T. Brinkmann, J. Lillepärg, H. Notzke, J. Pohlmann, S. Shishatskiy, J. Wind, T. Wolff, "Development of CO2 selective poly(ethylene oxide)-based membranes: from laboratory to pilot plant scale," Engineering, vol. 3, pp. 485-493, 2017.
13. M. Perera, R. Gamage, T. Rathnaweera, A. Ranathunga, A. Koay, and X. Choi, "A review of CO2-enhanced oil recovery with a simulated sensitivity analysis," Energies, vol. 9, pp. 481, 2016.
14. J.-M. Amann and C. Bouallou, "CO2 capture from power stations running with natural gas (NGCC) and pulverized coal (PC): Assessment of a new chemical solvent based on aqueous solutions of N-methyldiethanolamine + triethylene tetramine," Energy Procedia, vol. 1, pp. 909-916, 2009.
15. M. Savsar, M. Alardhi, and A. Almazrouee, "Capacity and availability analysis of power plants in Kuwait," in Process International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Operations Management, Istanbul, Turkey, 2012, pp. 1598-1607.
16. R. Davis, "Simple gas permeation and pervaporation membrane unit operation models for process simulators," Chem. Eng. Technol, vol. 25, pp. 717-722, 2002.
17. J. Chen, "Comments on improvements on a replacement for the logarithmic mean," Chem. Eng. Sci., vol. 42, pp. 2488-2489, 1987.
18. "Post-combustion membranes for carbon capture," United Stated Depart of Energy, National Energy Technology Laboratory, 2013.
19. T. Merkel, H. Lin, X. Wei, and R. Baker, "Power plant post-combustion carbon dioxide capture: an opportunity for membranes," J. Membr. Sci, vol. 359, pp. 126-139, 2010.
20. S. Subraveti, S. Roussanaly, R. Anantharaman, L. Riboldi, and A. Rajendran, "Techno-economic assessment of optimised vacuum swing adsorption for post-combustion CO2 capture from steam-methane reformer flue gas," Sep. Purif. Technol., vol. 256, pp. 117832, 2021.
21. R. Chavez and J. de J. Guadarrama, Recent technologies in capture of CO2: Bentham Science Publishers, 2014.
22. L. Zhao, E. Riensche, L. Blum, and D. Stolten, "How gas separation membrane competes with chemical absorption in postcombustion capture," Energy Procedia, vol. 4, pp. 629-636, 2011.
23. L. Øi, N. Eldrup, U. Adhikari, M. Bentsen, J. Badalge, and S. Yang, "Simulation and cost comparison of CO2 liquefaction," Energy Procedia, vol. 86, pp. 500-510, 2016.
24. A. Kohl and R. Nielsen, Gas purification: Elsevier Science, 1997.
25. T. Merkel, "Development of membrane technology for CO2 capture at MTR," presented at the Symposium for Innovative CO2 Membrane Separation Technology, Tokyo, Japan, 2012.