CO₂ Capture in the Cement Industry

Modern cement plants have high energy efficiencies and the scope to reduce CO₂ emissions by further efficiency improvements is small. One of the few ways of greatly reducing CO₂ production from cement production is CO₂ capture and storage (CCS). This paper summarises a study which assessed the technologies that could be used for CO₂ capture in cement plants, their costs, and barriers to their use. The work covered new-build cement plants with post-combustion and oxy-combustion CO₂ capture. The basis of the study was a 5-stage preheater with precalciner dry process cement plant with a cement output of 1 Mt/y located in NE Scotland, UK. Process Flow Diagrams (PFDs) and heat and mass balance calculations for both options were developed. The plant costs were estimated and the costs per tonne of CO₂ emissions avoided and per tonne of cement product determined.