To avoid increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases that raise the Earth's average temperature and thus contribute to climate change, we need to find a way to prevent carbon dioxide emissions from CO₂-intensive industries from escaping into the atmosphere. The rapid scale-up and deployment of more cost-effective and sustainable carbon capture solutions is one effective way. Solvent-based carbon capture is an important technology that can be readily adopted to many emission sources. Such technology can achieve high capture rates and deliver CO₂ at high purity with a relatively low energy demand.

While the three sectors are diverse in themselves in terms of e.g., flue gas composition and conditions, transferability to other types of industries is additionally ensured through this capture technology which can easily be adapted for implementation under other conditions.

There are currently various carbon capture routes, which fall into three categories: pre-combustion, post-combustion and oxy-combustion processes. As post-combustion is the easiest way to integrate carbon capture into existing plants, it has been widely developed in recent years and is well placed for large-scale deployment. Whereas solid adsorbents and membrane systems struggle to achieve the combined target of 90% capture rate and 95% purity, chemical absorption processes can achieve even higher CO₂ capture rates than the 90% currently deployed, and even close to 100% without significantly increasing the relative heat input. What's more, the purity of the CO₂ produced in these systems is intrinsically high (over 99%). However, absorption-based technology needs to be improved, mainly to reduce costs while guaranteeing the absence of any significant environmental impact.

Therefore, in order to rapidly translate research and innovation into impacts and enable the adoption of CCUS in CO₂-intensive industries in a short timeframe, AURORA partners will optimize and qualify a non-proprietary solvent (CESAR1) and its associated process, and bring them to a level from which first-of-a-kind plants can be considered as the next step. This will be achieved due to the following innovations:

These innovations will be integrated into four optimized capture processes, and various aspects will be demonstrated in pilot projects of varying size and complexity. The partners will ensure the transferability of the results to other CO₂-intensive industries, thanks to the wide range of CO₂ sources and developed groups addressed in the project, as well as the strong involvement of stakeholders. The project will also carry out comprehensive evaluations of the CCUS chain for its end-users. It should be noted that the end-users are located in two different regions of Europe, offering different conditions for the implementation of CCUS value chains.