Last week AIChE 13^th Annual Meeting was held in San Francisco with over 5000 participants from around the world. This AIChE Annual Meeting is a premier educational forum for chemical engineers interested in innovation and professional growth. Academic and industry experts covered a wide range of topics relevant to cutting-edge research, new technologies, and emerging growth areas in chemical engineering. Regarding to topics related to CCS there were several sessions on CO2 Capture, Transport, Storage, Utilization and Conversion.

I gave presentation on ‘CO2 Post Combustion Capture Operational Flexibility and Scale-Up for Power Plants’. In this presentation different options available to improve the flexibility of post combustion capture (amine based absorption process) plant by using solvent storage, turning off CO2 capture unit and CO2 buffer storage were presented. Moreover, any foreseen post combustion capture technology scale up issues was also presented. From this presentation the message was clear that there are options available to improve the flexibility of post combustion capture process and there are no technical challenges related to scale up of this Post combustion capture process.

CO2 conversion to useful chemicals or fuel is an interesting area and there were several presentations on this topic at this conference. The methods which were presented were looking into e.g. Conversion of Fusel Oil Alcohols (by product from sugar cane industry) to Alkyl Carbonates by Carbon Dioxide Fixation; Gas to Liquid process; CO2 uptake in concrete blocks carbonation; CO2 use in algae growth for biofuels; Photo-catalytic reduction of carbon dioxide to fuels using solar energy. It was noticed that there is a potential to convert CO₂ into useful products, still there is much further work required related to process optimization, CO2 uptake and economics.