Adsorption Materials and Processes for Carbon Capture from Gas-Fired Power Plants (AMPGas)

In line with the UK Climate Change Committee (CCC) recommendations, the focus of this proposal is on capture technology for retrofit to existing CCGT plants. Next generation enhanced capture technology will be developed; in particular plant size will be reduced through novel advanced adsorbents and the optimisation of fast cycle thermal regeneration using rotary wheel adsorbers. The key challenge in post combustion capture from gas fired power plants is the low CO2 concentration in the flue gas, approximately 4% by volume. This means that conventional amine processes will have a large energy penalty and the presence of oxygen in high concentration will lead to high amine deactivation rates. Novel adsorbents and adsorption processes have the potential to improve the efficiency of the separation process. Given the very low CO2 partial pressure in the flue gas, the selection of novel adsorbents is very different from the equivalent approach to coal-fired power plants. The adsorbents will have to have a very high selectivity to achieve good capture capacity with dilute mixtures. As a result these materials will have to be based either on very strong physisorption or chemisorption and the regeneration will have to be by thermal cycling. This poses the engineering challenge of developing a process that will achieve rapid thermal swings of the order of a few minutes, which is over an order of magnitude faster than traditional Thermal Swing Adsorption (TSA) fixed bed processes. The project is an ambitious programme of work that will address both materials and process development for carbon capture from gas fired power plants.