MOF4AIR Project (H2020): Metal Organic Frameworks for Carbon Dioxide Adsorption Processes in Power Production and Energy Intensive Industries

Abstract

Power generation and carbon-intensive industries are responsible of a large share of the anthropogenic CO2 emissions into the atmosphere and play an important role in the greenhouse effect and global warming. Shifting towards a low-carbon economy needs, in addition to reductions at source and use of renewable energy, cost-effective novel carbon capture solution to be conceived, tested and deployed. Current mature solutions either suffer from elevated energy penalties and environmental impacts like in amines-based adsorption and lot of other solutions simply cannot offer sufficient performances. Adsorption processes are promising alternatives for capturing CO2 from power plants and other energy intensive industries as cement, steel or petrochemical industries.

In this regard, Metal Organic Frameworks (MOFs) are a widely studied class of porous adsorbents (recent crystallized porous materials) that offers tremendous potential, owing to their large CO2 adsorption capacity and high CO2 affinity (MOFs can be tuned to create specific adsorption sites associated for trapping CO2). However, the performances of MOF-based carbon capture technologies have not been fully evaluated with flue gases on industrial sites.

In this context, the MOF4AIR project (H2020 LC-SC3-NZE-1-2018) gathers 14 partners from 8 countries and aims to develop, validate and demonstrate the performances of MOF-based CO2 capture technologies (VPSA and MBTSA) in power plants and energy intensive industries. The developed capture solutions will be demonstrated in real environment (TRL 6) on 3 demonstration sites. MOF4AIR aims to foster the uptake of CCUS technologies by providing a TRL6-reliable solution matching end users' needs. The solutions developed will be highly replicable thanks to the consideration of a wide range of carbon intensive sectors and clusters.