Verification and demonstration of an advanced adsorption reactor for cost effective CO₂ capture

 Background and project purpose?
With CO₂ prices recently surpassing 80 €/ton in Europe, there is growing economic pressure to decarbonize existing industrial processes via CCS retrofits. However, such retrofits tend to be complex and expensive, especially if the process does not have large amounts of waste heat available for driving the CO₂ capture process. The purpose of this project is to demonstrate a novel post-combustion CO₂ capture technology that solves this challenge via “plug-and-play” CO₂ capture from industry using only electrical energy. Such a concept employs a synergetic combination of heat and vacuum pumps to reduce the energy penalty in adsorption-based CO₂ capture and drive CO₂ avoidance costs down relative to benchmarking amine technology.

What is the project objective?
The main objective of this project is to demonstrate an innovative, cost-effective, adsorption-based concept called CSAR (Continuous Swing Adsorption Reactor) for capturing CO₂ from hard-to-abate CO₂-intensive industries (e.g., waste-to-energy and cement). The key outcomes of the project will be the explicit verification of the CSAR technology feasibility for capturing CO₂ from real industrial flue gases at the BIR waste-to-energy (WtE) plant in Bergen, as well as confirming the potential for cost reductions as predicted by the preliminary techno-economic assessments. WTE is a good first application for CSAR because it runs on electrical energy and will therefore not consume the primary product (heat) of the plant like conventional CO₂ capture solutions.

What will the project do in terms of activities?
The CSAR pilot will be designed for continuous CO₂ capture from real industrial flue gases. The validation tests will be completed in the lab, investigating all the functionalities of the concept and mapping out the performance over a wide range of operating conditions. The rig will then be moved to the BIR WtE site for further testing under real industrial conditions. By completing the industrial tests, the CSAR technology will reach TRL 6 (EU; 1 – 9).

The commercialisation activities are led by Captico2, while SINTEF will complete the detailed study on optimisation and validation through pilot experiments, reactor modelling (both for design and upscaling), techno-economic assessments as well as leading the demonstration activities in the WTE plant. BIR will participate during this industrial demonstration of the technology. An upscaling strategy for demonstration of a pre-commercial scale CSAR unit with a capacity of 5 T-CO₂/day will also be completed.

Future plans?
Following the successful demonstration at TRL 6 and explicit proof of the cost reduction potential, the CSAR concept can further be upscaled to several tonne-CO₂ capture per day for WtE applications and other industrial sectors (cement, coal, chemicals, metallurgy, etc.).