CO 2 Capture – A Brief Review of Technologies and Its Integration

Abstract

The Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) recently released the special report on 1.5C [1] and pointed out the need to implement all available tools to cut down CO2 emissions. Energy efficiency, fuel switching, renewables, and carbon capture represent the largest impact on CO2 emission reduction in power and industrial sectors. Carbon capture represents a contribution of 23% in the “Beyond 2 degrees scenario” (B2DS) modeled by the International Energy Agency (IEA)1 and has other interesting characteristics that increase its value beyond its cost: (i) easiness to retrofit current power plants or industrial facilities,2 (ii) simplicity to integrate that in the electricity grid and offer an interesting tool to cover the intermittency of renewables, (iii) ideal to cut down industrial process emissions that otherwise cannot suffer deep reductions, and (iv) current carbon budgets rely on negative emissions to compensate the use of fossil fuels [1]. Carbon capture combined with bioenergy (BECCS) can provide negative emissions at large scale in an immediate future. CO2 capture (also called CO2 sequestration or carbon capture) involves a group of technologies aiming to separate CO2 from other compounds released during the production of energy or industrial products, obtaining a CO2-rich gas that can be stored or used for the obtention of valuable products. The main classification of CO2 capture technologies relies on where in the process the CO2 separation occurs. For the power sector, it can be divided into pre-, oxy-, and post-combustion. For the industrial sector, the classification is similar, although their integration would be different. In addition, other new arrangements are emerging.