Amine scrubbing is widely recognized as the best available technology for CO2 separation from gases. It is, however, extremely expensive and therefore better amines or other solvents are needed. In this paper the relative contributions to the overall energy consumption for an amine-based separation are examined for a variety of actual and hypothetical amines. The hypothetical amines were characterized by a wide range of heats of reaction and equilibrium constants for the main reaction. As the main reaction, carbamate formation was taken for primary and secondary amines and protonation for tertiary amines. The calculations gave a minimum in the overall energy demand for values of heat of reaction and the equilibrium constant which are close to the actual values for amines currently in use. This suggests that different amine structures will not result in a better overall energy demand.
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