(629h) Advanced Membranes for Industrial Decarbonization and Hydrogen Purification

Although the majority of the world has now accepted that global climate change is due to human activities, we will not be able to switch gears and only go for “green energy” without fossil fuels for many decades. One way of contributing to combat climate change is hence to capture the CO₂ from flue gases, and either find ways to utilize the CO₂ or sequestrate it in aquifers or depleted oil fields. Another way is to slowly develop a “green way of living” by using renewable and less carbon-intensive energies such as H₂ and biomethane. Membranes will for sure represent one of the emerging technologies to be used for CO₂ capture, biogas upgrading, hydrogen purification, etc. The type of material developed at the pilot scale is the facilitated transport composite membranes where a polyvinylamine selective layer is coated on top of polysulfone, which shows high separation performance for CO₂ capture from flue gas in power plants and cement factories. However, the technology development is not straightforward, and moving from a lab-scale module using a few cm² up to several m² of a pilot-scale module is particularly challenging ^[1-2]. This presentation will then report on the material development, module design and upscaling, pilot testing, and techno-economic feasibility analysis of FT membranes for post-combustion carbon capture. Moreover, carbon molecular sieve membranes show particular interest in high-temperature and/or high-pressure applications, especially hydrogen purification and recovery. Cellulose-based hollow fiber carbon membranes present high performances toward H₂/CO₂ separation from steam methane reforming processes ^[3] and also the H₂ recovery from natural gas grid ^[4]. Both the material development and techno-economic feasibility analysis for different scenarios will be presented.