Techno-economical Analysis of CO2 Capture from Biomass-derived Syngas

Abstract

The application of renewables is one of the key aspects of the design of sustainable processes. Biomass has a high interest as a feedstock, mostly because of the conversion potential to valuable products, e.g. syngas (containing hydrogen and carbon monoxide). Regarding sustainability and global climate change, carbon dioxide reduction, capture and storage are important tasks of waste-derived syngas production. There are many possibilities for the further handling of syngas to reduce the carbon dioxide concentrations, such as absorption, adsorption etc. The main goal of this study is to optimise the parameters and design the key operating units of different scenarios for carbon dioxide reduction (absorption by monoethanolamine (MEA) solution, cryogenic distillation, Ca-looping) from biomass-derived syngas. Pyrolysis-reforming of the biomass has been performed in a multizone horizontal tubular reactor using different process parameters. Gas fraction has been analysed by gas-chromatography, then based on the result, the key process parameters were identified focusing on the techno-economical approach of the different scenarios. The CO2 removal efficiencies obtained by cryogenic distillation and Ca-looping were nearly the same. Meanwhile, the amine solution absorbed 83.5 % of the CO2 content of the feedstock. The capital expenditures of the absorption, cryogenic distillation and Ca-looping were 1,587,000, 2,633,000 and 1,555,000 USD, respectively. The calculated values of the operating expenditures (OPEX) changed between 42,000 and 529,000 USD/year, while according to the expectations, the highest OPEX was observed in cryogenic distillation. Based on the results, it was found that the best available technology for CO2 removal is absorption using MEA solution.