Pillared Clays as Cost-Effective Adsorbents for Carbon Capture by Pressure Swing Adsorption Processes in the Cement Industry

Abstract

CO2 adsorption technology is gaining so much attention as a viable technique to mitigate the greenhouse effect. Having the appropriate adsorbent coupled with an optimized process design is the key issue toward its further development and wide industrialization. In the current work, we research two types of pillared clays, namely, aluminum oxide (Al-PILC) and zirconium oxide (Zr-PILC) applied in the pressure swing adsorption (PSA) technology for carbon dioxide capture in the cement industry. A comparison with the benchmark, zeolite 13X, is made. The first process analyzed is a two-stage system consisted of two beds, each stage operating in the Skarstrom cycle, where a techno-economic analysis is performed, including capital and operational costs. The Zr-PILC demonstrated the best performance with a purity of 76.6% and recovery of 72.1% in the first process design. The total annualized cost of CO2 for such a system is 25.71 €/ton avoided. Then, a six-bed system operating in a 6-1-4 adsorption cycle and a total of 18 steps is implemented. The best candidate Zr-PILC of the first process design is chosen as the adsorbent of the second design. The six-bed-PSA process has an annualized CO2 cost of 19.17 €/ton with a 78% of purity and 71.3% of CO2 recovery.