Abstract

The aim of the AURORA project has been to qualify the open and non-proprietary CESAR1 solvent technology for commercial deployment. As part of this qualification there have been two major test campaigns in pilots (the Tiller pilot and the Technology Centre Mongstad -TCM) and validated process models based on these test campaigns are further used for determining the solvent performance for a broad range of flue gas conditions (CO2 concentration, water content, flue-gas flowrate, temperature) relevant for four distinct process plants (two refineries, one cement producer and one materials recycling plant). Two different steady state simulators are used for the process simulations, Aspen Plus and CO2SIM. The latter being an inhouse rate-based CO2 capture simulator was established for efficient development of various solvent systems. Within the AURORA project, the simulator has been extensively upgraded with respect to the procedure for validation of the process model including pre-assessment of the data quality prior to comparison of the experimental and simulated data. Furthermore, an extensive work has been done to update the underlying CESAR1 solvent models (thermodynamics, kinetics, and property data) as well as improvements of the enthalpy balance of the process models. While the validation procedure and validation against the Tiller pilot have been previously presented, the focus here is the validation against the data from the TCM demonstration campaign using CO2SIM software.

Keywords: post-combustion carbon capture; Amine based CO2 absorption, CESAR1 solvent; pilot testing; model validation

Authors: F. Andrew Tobiesena, Hanne M. Kvamsdala, Thor Mejdella, Karl Anders Hoffa (SINTEF Industry), Koteswara Rao Putta (Technology Center Mongstad).