Process Operability Analysis of Membrane-Based Direct Air Capture for Low-Purity CO2 Production

Addressing climate change constitutes one of the major scientific challenges of this century, and it is widely acknowledged that anthropogenic CO₂ emissions largely contribute to this issue. To achieve the “net-zero” target and keep the rise in global average temperature below 1.5 °C, negative emission technologies must be developed and deployed at a large scale. This study investigates the feasibility of using membranes as direct air capture (DAC) technology to extract CO₂ from atmospheric air to produce low-purity CO₂. In this work, a two-stage hollow fiber membrane module process is designed and modeled using the AVEVA Process Simulation platform to produce a low-purity (≈5%) CO₂ permeate stream. Such low-purity CO₂ streams could have several possible applications such as algae growth, catalytic oxidation, and enhanced oil recovery. An operability analysis is performed by mapping a feasible range of input parameters, which include membrane surface area and membrane performance metrics, to an output set, which consists of CO₂ purity, recovery, and net energy consumption. The base case for this simulation study is generated considering a facilitated transport membrane with high CO₂/N₂ separation performance (CO₂ permeance = 2100 GPU and CO₂/N₂ selectivity = 1100), when tested under DAC conditions. With a constant membrane area, both membranes’ intrinsic performances are found to have a considerable impact on the purity, recovery, and energy consumption. The area of the first module plays a dominant role in determining the recovery, purity, and energy demands, and in fact, increasing the area of the second membrane has a negative impact on the overall energy consumption, without improving the overall purities. The CO₂ capture capacity of DAC units is important for implementation and scale-up. In this context, the performed analysis showed that the m-DAC process could be appropriate as a small-capacity system (0.1–1 Mt/year of air), with reasonable recoveries and overall purity. Finally, a preliminary CO₂ emissions analysis is carried out for the membrane-based DAC process, which leads to the conclusion that the overall energy grid must be powered by renewable sources for the technology to qualify within the negative emissions category.