Techno-economic study of different process configurations of CO2 capture by MEA absorption and utilization of an MCDM method for their ranking

Carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel-fired power stations are attracting growing attention as a potential approach for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Post-combustion capture of CO2 with monoethanolamine (MEA) is one of the most successful and mature technologies for mitigating carbon dioxide emissions. The most crucial problem of this technique is the high heat requirement of the reboiler for solvent regeneration. In this study, seven different configurations for carbon capture, namely, standard absorption, vapor recompression, vapor recompression process with split-flow, absorption column with intercooling, rich-split, combined, and rich-split with vapor recompression, are studied. The simulation results showed that the reboiler energy consumption intensity of alternative configurations lowered by 15.2 %, 18.4 %, 2.9 %, 7.4 %, 20.3 %, and 23.2 %, respectively, with regard to the standard absorption configuration. Seven configurations were ranked based on the total investment cost, steam consumption, power consumption, and water consumption. Combined and rich-split were the best, and vapor recompression and Rich-split with vapor recompression were the worst.