Energy Savings in CO 2 Capture System through Intercooling Mechanism

It has been globally recognized as necessary to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for mitigating the adverse effects of global warming on earth. Carbon dioxide (CO2) capture and storage (CCS) technologies can play a critical role to achieve these reductions. Current CCS technologies use several different approaches including adsorption, membrane separation, physical and chemical absorption to separate CO2 from flue gases. This study aims to evaluate the performance and energy savings of CO2 capture system based on chemical absorption by installing an intercooler in the system. Monoethanolamine (MEA) was used as the absorption solvent and Aspen HYSYS (ver. 9) was used to simulate the CO2 capturing model. The positioning of the intercooler was studied in 10 different cases and compared with the base case 0 without intercooling. It was found that the installation of the intercooler improved the overall efficiency of CO2 recovery in the designed system for all 1-10 cases. Intercooler case 9 was found to be the best case in providing the highest recovery of CO2 (92.68%), together with MEA solvent savings of 2.51%. Furthermore, energy savings of 16 GJ/h was estimated from the absorber column alone, that would increase many folds for the entire CO2 capture plant. The intercooling system, thus showed improved CO2 recovery performance and potential of significant savings in MEA solvent loading and energy requirements, essential for the development of economical and optimized CO2 capturing technology.