(68g) Capturing CO2 with Molten Borate Salts (Mantel)

Mantel is developing the first liquid carbon capture material that operates at high temperatures - a combination that improves thermal efficiency and reduces costs making carbon capture a pragmatic solution for reducing global CO₂ emissions.

In Professor Hatton's lab back in 2018 molten borates were discovered as an innovative new material for carbon capture. After 4 years of research in 2022 Mantel spun out of Professor Hatton's lab with a mission to scale-up and deploy the technology in industry. Since then Mantel has attracted over $50M in dilutive and non-dilutive funding and is in the process of building a demonstration project at a Pulp and Paper Mill in Quebec.

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Mantel Overview

Heavy industry dominates global CO₂ emissions and carbon capture has a critical role to play in decarbonizing hard-to-abate sectors such as power generation, industrial heat, cement, steel, and blue hydrogen. We also need to be removing CO₂ from the atmosphere to reach net-zero, we can do this by pairing capture with biogenic sources of carbon such as pulp & paper, waste-to-energy, and bioenergy. This CO₂ ultimately needs to be transported either to sequestration – storage underground – or utilized turning it into valuable products. However, the driver of cost is capture, which is Mantel’s focus.

The majority of existing absorption materials for carbon capture are inherently limited by the energy penalty associated with low temperature operations. Regenerating or liberating CO₂ consumes large quantities of energy, on the other hand capturing CO₂ generates large quantities of energy. Low temperature capture is inefficient because the energy generated on capture is wasted as low-grade heat. For high temperature CO₂ capture the energy generated on capture can be efficiently recovered as high-grade heat and passed through heat recovery systems to generate steam.

Previous attempts to exploit this advantage have been unsuccessful due to the use of solid-phase capture materials. At high temperatures solid sinters and degrade rapidly and these materials must be replaced continuously. Mantel’s liquid phase molten borates are immune to this type of degradation because on each cycle the material is re-formed to its original state; the technology has demonstrated near-perfect cycling. By combining high temperature and liquid phase operation the molten borates enable new process designs that increase thermal efficiency and substantially reduces the cost of carbon capture and storage.