Reporting from the ECR Winter School 2015 – Jon Gibbins (UKCCSRC) speaking on CO₂ Capture

This blog was provided by Fatemeh Rezazadeh, University of Leeds, whose attendance at the ECR Winter School 2015 was supported by the UKCCSRC.

On 16 February Prof Jon Gibbins presented on “CO₂ capture” at the UKCCSRC Winter School 2015 at the University of Nottingham. He started his presentation by introducing the UK Carbon Capture and Storage Research Centre (UKCCSRC) and pointing out the Centre’s roles and responsibilities. The presentation introduced novel technologies that are most likely to appear in Phase 2 and 3 of CCS deployment such as calcium looping, chemical looping, solid adsorbents, immobilised solvents and membrane technologies. He also gave an update on the current status and progress of the UK two major CCS projects: White Rose CCS and Peterhead CCS projects.

The presentation addressed the problems occurred in the Kemper Integrated Coal Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) facility in eastern Mississippi during the plant start-up, which led to the project cost rising by an addition of $496M. This problem made the overall cost of the plant reach more than $6.1 billion. The project was originally budgeted for $2.8 billion.

Prof Gibbins continued by presenting process optimisation techniques applied in Fluor Econamine FG+ to improve the performance of the CO₂ capture plant such as application of absorber intercooler and lean vapour compression systems. In addition to above, he showed the total energy required for the solvent regeneration for PZ solvent is considerably lesser than that of the conventional MEA solutions.

Prof Gibbins provided an update on the SaskPower Boundary Dam Unit 3 CO₂ capture project in Canada. This project is the first CCS power project in the world with a total cost of $1.4 billion. The SaskPower CCS plant is a post-combustion CO₂ capture plant with a total capacity of nearly 1Mt CO₂ per year. The plant was commissioned in October 2014.

Finally, Prof Gibbins presented the research objectives of the EPSRC Gas-FACTS project, including the application of exhaust gas recycle (EGR), water/steam injection to gas turbine (HAT cycle), application of membrane system for CO₂ transfer and recycle (CTR), and Fuel Flexibility (natural gas, biofuel, liquid fuel, biofuel and H₂ enriched gas). These research activities will be experimentally investigated in the UKCCSRC PACT facilities.