(528f) Techno-Economic and Life-Cycle Analysis of Integrated Carbon Capture and Conversion to Materials (IC3M) Platform for Producing Synthetic Natural Gas and Methanol

Carbon capture and conversion is a strategic approach to alleviate climate change by simultaneously reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and generating value-added products from captured carbon. Over the past decade, several demonstration plants have been constructed in Europe to produce synthetic natural gas (SNG) or methanol from CO₂ (Jiang et al., 2024). Each plant includes a carbon capture unit to generate pure CO₂ from industrial exhaust gas at low pressure, a CO₂ compressor to bring CO₂ to a high pressure required by downstream reactions and a thermochemical CO₂ hydrogenation unit to convert CO₂. However, these plants, which use a Separated Carbon Capture and Conversion to Material (SC3M) platform, are often energy-intensive, mainly due to the solvent/sorbent regeneration and CO₂ compression steps, resulting in a high conversion cost. Leveraging emerging water-lean solvents developed for low-cost carbon capture (Jiang et al., 2023), recently, an integrated carbon capture and conversion to material (IC3M) platform has been developed at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (Kothandaraman et al., 2022), and proven in a lab-scale continuous flow system. In the IC3M platform, CO₂ in the flue gas is captured by water-lean solvent. This CO₂-rich solvent then directly reacts with H₂ in a condensed phase, while the energy-intensive solvent regeneration and CO₂ compression steps are eliminated. Consequently, it is anticipated that the energy consumption and cost of the IC3M platform will be significantly lower than those of the SC3M platform, paving the way for a more sustainable future. In this talk, we will present process models developed in Aspen Plus for IC3M technologies to produce both SNG and methanol based on experimental data, and a comprehensive techno-economic and life-cycle analyses to compare IC3M, SC3M, and fossil-based methanol and methane. The key measures include, but are not limited to, energy efficiency, minimum product selling price, conversion cost, and cradle-to-grave GHG emissions.

References

Jiang et al., 2024. Emerging technology review: carbon capture and conversion to methane and methanol. Technical Report. PNNL-35588. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA.

Jiang et al., 2023 Energy-effective and low-cost carbon capture from point-sources enabled by water-lean solvents. Journal of Cleaner Production 388, 135696.