Evaluation method of novel absorbents for CO2 capture

The COCS (Cost Saving CO2 Capture System) Project is concerned with the R&D of CO2 capture from gas streams using a chemical absorption process and has been conducted since 2004 as a five year project. Three high performance absorbents (Solvents A, B and C) with different characteristics have been developed to date in this project. The best energy performance as estimated by mathematical analysis was 2.57 GJ/t- CO2 in terms of regeneration energy. This value is far lower than the value for the commercially used absorbent (monoethanolamine, MEA; 4.0 GJ/t- CO2). These values were found in bench-scale tests (MEA: 4.1, Solvent-C: 2.8 GJ/t- CO2). If these new absorbents could be applied to CO2 capture the cost can be reduced by 40%.