Options for Carbon Capture from Refineries / Chemical Sites Smr

IPCC’s special report on the impact of 1.5C warming which concludes that “early scale-up of industry CCS is essential to achieve the stringent temperature target”. CCUS technologies (Carbon Capture and Utilization or Sequestration) are especially of interest for hydrogen production units, which emit significant amounts of CO₂ and offer several options to capture this CO₂ from otherwise clean gases, such as Pressure Swing Adsorption (PSA) feed gas, PSA purge gas, or Steam Methane Reformer (SMR) furnace exhaust gas. Hydrogen manufacturing units are thus likely to be among the first sources of CO₂ that refiners and chemical sites in USGC will look at to reduce their carbon footprint.

Amine-based absorption systems offer a proven, reliable and cost-effective method to capture CO₂ from the different SMR gas streams. While the SMR syngas (outlet of shift reactor after heat recovery), characterized by a high CO₂ partial pressure, presents the opportunity to capture CO₂ at the lowest unit cost ($/tCO2), post-combustion (furnace exhaust) capture maximizes the amount of CO₂ captured. Both have been proven at large scale; in particular capture from the high-pressure syngas has been successfully applied at the Scotford refinery (Alberta), where the Quest project, using the ADIP-X technology, has already captured and sequestered more than four million tons of CO₂ and generated valuable learnings for replication in future SMR CCUS projects.

The presentation will discuss the relative merits and costs of both options, and in particular how integration with an industrial gas SMR located at USGC site can help provide the energy required for absorbent regeneration, which is around 2 GJ/ton of CO₂, and for 1,000 KTA CO2 capture unit results in a LPS steam requirement of approximately 110 tonne/hr.