Reactive CO2 Capture via Inorganic Carbonate Crystallization

Despite ambitious targets set by businesses and government to reduce emissions and improve sustainability, industries lack the scalable technologies to achieve these goals. While promising methods to capture and convert CO2 into value-added products including fuels and chemicals have been commercialized, these pathways are thermodynamically uphill, energy-intensive, and require temperatures above 75 ºC. The company is developing a novel single-step, low temperature adaptive process for the integrated capture and conversion of CO2 into valuable calcium and magnesium carbonates for use in construction materials. The single-step, thermodynamically downhill approaches developed by the company do not consume acids and bases for carbon mineralization, and instead use solvents that transfer CO2 from the gas to the liquid phase, and from the liquid phase to solid carbonates. These carbonates can be used as supplementary cementitious materials for producing sustainable construction materials. Through this DOE project, the company seeks to develop methods to modularize, scale, and adapt this process for site- and application-specific deployment. Specifically, the company proposes to: (1) Investigate the impact of flue gas compositions representative of various industries such as iron and steel, cement, and mining on CO2 capture and mineralization efficiency, (2) Develop scalable reactor configurations for integrated CO2 capture and mineralization, (3) Model conditions for optimal carbon mineralization and solvent regeneration, (4) Tune process implementation pathways based on the compositions of various alkaline industrial residues, and (5) Determine economical and feasible implementation pathways based on Techno Economic Assessments and Life Cycle Analyses of the input, process, and output conditions. Successful accomplishment of these objectives will inform operating principles needed for commercial deployment, positioning the technology for Phase II scaleup and market launch. This technology can be adapted to create a new market for synthetic inorganic carbonates from anthropogenic CO2 as opposed to mining naturally occurring carbonates. The company believes that this adaptive environmentally sustainable technology can meet the unaddressed need to simultaneously treat multiple heterogeneous waste streams and produce value-added products.