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

Year 2021, Volume: 24 Issue: 4, 72 - 77, 01.12.2021

Yousef Alqaheem

https://doi.org/10.5541/ijot.1017177

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

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