Comparative Life-Cycle Assessment of Carbon Capture Technologies(PPT)

摘要

Up until today, the technology used for the capture and production of pure CO2 in post-combustion applications for both use and sequestration relies primarily on the use of chemical amine solvents such as monoethanolamine (MEA). However, these solvents require significant amounts of valuable, high-grade process heat for solvent regeneration and suffer from substantial operational and environmental issues including degradation, toxic aerosol emissions, sensitivity to flue gas contaminants, and corrosivity. CO2 Solutions Inc (CSI) recently developed and deployed a new technology to solve these challenges by employing a non-toxic low-cost, stable salt solution as an absorption solution and the carbonic anhydrase enzyme as a catalyst for carbon management. The result is both fast CO2 absorption kinetics and significantly reduced energy costs by allowing to use low-grade heat to drive the solution regeneration. This study aims to analyze and compare the environmental profile of capture processes such as CSI, MEA and UNO MK3 (a precipitating potassium carbonate separation process). The context of the study is CO2 capture from the flue gas stream of a 550 MW coal-fired power station in the midwestern USA. To fulfill the objective, we performed an attributional cradle-to-gate LCA comparing the three systems. This study was conducted according to the requirements of ISO 14040 & 140441, 2 and a review by an independent panel is in its final stages (report write-up). Data were mainly based on process simulation of the three technologies. The impact assessment was carried out with the Impact 2002+ method3. This method considers four indicators at endpoint level (Climate change, Human health, Ecosystem quality and Resources) and sixteen indicators at midpoint level (for instance Aquatic Acidification or Ozone formation).