(572m) Bench Test and Techno-Economic Analysis (TEA) of MEA-Based CO2 Capture for Refinery Emitting Point Sources

There is a lot of interest in global climate change, which is connected to the development of CO₂ capture systems with a variety of technologies applied. In particular, industrial fields like steel and iron, cement, petrochemicals, and refineries, have emitted CO₂ into the atmosphere with various emitting points, which makes a difficult to install the CO₂ capture facility in the industrial complex. As a representative part, the refinery industry has 4 emitting points CDU/VDU, FCC, HMP, and power generation. Although a large portion of CO₂ is emitted from the power generation process, this study focuses on the other processes that are highly related to the refinery sector.

The Packed Bed (PB) bench process (150 Nm³/h) has been applied to separate CO₂ from CDU/VDU (13.7 % dry CO₂), FCC (15 % dry CO₂), and HMP (22.5 % dry CO₂) sources. The 30 wt% of Monoethanolamine (MEA) is utilized for the absorption materials. The CO₂ concentration is systematically adjusted using the LNG reboiler system with a CO₂ recycling drum which is monitored by an ND-IR analyzer in real time. The estimated regeneration thermal energy is utilized to evaluate the efficiency of the absorption-based CO₂ capture facility. Also, the ASPEN PLUS incorporated with the estimated regeneration energy is utilized to evaluate the sizes of the main process equipment. It is investigated that the techno-economic analysis has been carried out based on the simulation sizing data for the three refinery cases.

As a future work, the Rotating Packed Bed bench facility has been constructed in the KIER pilot test area. Therefore, the comparison of the PB and RPB will be carried out for the representative three CO₂-emitting sources.

This work was supported by Korea Institute of Energy Technology Evaluation and Planning (KETEP) grant funded by the Korea government (MOTIE) (No. 20224C10300050).