During the IEAGHG PCCC-6 (6th Post Combustion Capture Conference https://ieaghg.org/conferences/pccc, online ), 19-21 october 2021, Antoine Verhaeghe (UMONS) will present his work entitled « Amine solvent selection and carbon capture process configuration optimization for micro gas turbines », co-authors Lionel Dubois, Laurent Bricteux, Diane Thomas, Ward De Paepe.
The massive deployment of Renewable Energy (RE) over the last 10 years, in an attempt to reduce drastically the greenhouse gas emissions to limit the effects of global warming, is putting a severe constraint on classical thermal power production. Indeed, the inherent highly intermittent and uncertain character of RE in combination with the lacking storage capacity of batteries (especially for medium to long term) is requiring a high flexibility level for the classic thermal power production to balance production with demand to ensure grid stability. Small-scale thermal production in Decentralized Energy Systems (DESs), possibly in Combined Heat and Power (CHP) applications like micro Gas Turbines (mGTs), offer high potential to provide the necessary flexibility. However, if we want to move towards a carbon neutral society by 2050, these units cannot emit any greenhouse gases. Applying Carbon Capture (CC) offers a solution, but this option was never found economical feasible for these small-scales (5-500kWe). Post-combustion chemical absorption process requires a consequent amount of energy thus degrading plant performances. The heat required to regenerate the solvent in the stripper column is the main contribution to the CC energy consumption. Therefore, to make carbon clean mGT more efficient and thus economically profitable, this energy penalty has to be minimized. Next to a better integration of the different mGT and CC heat streams, selection of the appropriate solvent and process configuration will help reducing this energy penalty. In this respect, this work is a pre-study on the impact of the solvent and process selection on the energy consumption for the CC plant coupled with a mGT. Two amines solvents are selected and investigated in this preliminary study: monoethanolamine (MEA) and a mixture of methyldiethanolamine (MDEA) with piperazine (PZ) implemented considering a Rich Vapor Compression (RVC) and InterCooling Absorber (ICA) configuration. The performance of a mGT, namely the Turbec T100, coupled with a chemical absorption plant is assessed for both cases using Aspen Plus. Simulation results allow to evaluate the energy consumption of CC plant for each process as well as the energy penalty induced on the mGT cycle. Hence, this study gives a first indication on the solvent and configuration to be used in such applications. Moreover, this study also highlights, that next to the careful selection of the CC process, an energy integration of both system (CC+mGT) is required to reduce the energy penalty.
