2014-TR4 Emerging Capture Technologies

Publication Overview

This Technical Review gives an interim overview of research and development aimed at improving and reducing the cost of commercial scale carbon dioxide capture in the power and process industries. It considers technologies principally applicable in post-combustion capture, pre-combustion capture, oxy-combustion capture and finally systems with circulating solids; in that order, which is more or less in line with the current maturity of each approach. It then goes on to consider applications in iron and steel and cement production and oil refining. IEAGHG’s normal practice is for its reports to be sent to external reviewers and for the reviewers’ comments to be taken into account prior to publication. This Technical Review is an interim report which has not yet gone through this process. An IEAGHG Report which has been subject to external review will be published in due course.  

Publication Summary

A wide range of alternative CO₂ capture technologies has been reported. There may be significant differences between claims of the developers and the practicality, which this study has attempted to highlight. Amongst the many R&D initiatives there are several which stand out usually because of their favourable thermodynamics allowing reduction of the energy efficiency penalty. Of particular note are proposals which have been made for system configurations where recycles are created to concentrate CO₂. This allows simpler, lower cost separation processes which do not work well on low concentrations of CO₂ to be included in overall schemes.