State-of-the-art Adsorption and Membrane Separation Processes for Carbon Dioxide Production from Carbon Dioxide Emitting Industries

Abstract With the growing concern about global warming placing greater demands on improving energy efficiency and reducing CO2 emissions, the need for improving the energy intensive, separation processes involving CO2 is well recognized. The US Department of Energy estimates that the separation of CO2 represents 75% of the cost associated with its separation, storage, transport, and sequestration operations. Hence, energy efficient, CO2 separation technologies with improved economics are needed for industrial processing and for future options to capture and concentrate CO2 for reuse or sequestration. The overall goal of this review is to foster the development of new adsorption and membrane technologies to improve manufacturing efficiency and reduce CO2 emissions. This study focuses on the power, petrochemical, and other CO2 emitting industries, and provides a detailed review of the current commercial CO2 separation technologies, i.e., absorption, adsorption, membrane, and cryogenic, an overview of the emerging adsorption and membrane technologies for CO2 separation, and both near and long term recommendations for future research on adsorption and membrane technologies. Flow sheets of the principal CO2 producing processes are provided for guidance and new conceptual flow sheets with ideas on the placement of CO2 separations technologies have also been devised.