Powerplant is the largest carbon emitter in the energy sector, creating almost 40% of global energy-related emissions. The capture of carbon dioxide (CO2) from powerplants is indispensable for its conversion or sequestration. Various solvent-based technologies including alkanolamines such as monoethanolamine (MEA) or diethanolamine (DEA) have been deployed for the post-combustion CO2 capture processes to reduce CO2 emissions in the industrial settings. Although these amines exhibit low CO2-rich viscosity, faster kinetics, and favorable thermodynamics they require prohibitively high energy for regeneration. To achieve a significant reduction in the costs, the development of new solvent chemistries remains attractive especially for large-scale industrial applications. Our group at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has been working on designing single-component water-lean solvents for CO2 capture by carefully tuning the acid/base equilibria via rational placement of hydrogen bonds and identifying the fundamental principles that control material properties such as viscosity and regeneration energy. PNNL’s leading CO2BOL diamine N-(2-ethoxyethyl)-3-morpholinopropan-1-amine (EEMPA) has been devised to be replacements for aqueous amines, has recently been shown to be an attractive post-combustion solvent. These diamine-based solvents exhibited high gravimetric CO2 capacity and displayed significantly lower CO2-rich solvent viscosities without co-solvents. This talk will provide details of post-combustion CO2 capture performance including vapor−liquid equilibria, sorption kinetics, and highlight durability of these non-aqueous diamine-based solvents N-(2-ethoxyethyl)-3-morpholinopropan-1-amine (2-EEMPA) and N1-(2-ethoxyethyl)-N2, N2-diisopropylethane-1,2-diamine (2-EEDIPEDA) for CO2 capture.

Development and performance of water-lean solvents for carbon dioxide capture

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ACS Fall 2022

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