Capturing Carbon-dioxide

About

Technology Florida International University (FIU) is seeking commercial partners interested in developing technologies for capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from blast furnace gas while simultaneously producing hydrogen gas and generating electricity. Most of the available techniques for CO2 capture are solvent-based and suffer inherit limitations and impediments. The existing technologies are unfavorable due to high raw material cost, severe energy penalty costs, requirement for several pretreatment steps prior to carbonation process, corrosiveness, and fast degradation of the sorbent. Researchers at FIU have proposed a new method able to bypass these limitations for carbon capture by using sorbent, which is readily accessible at any iron and steel industries. The suggested process is also easy to retrofit and thus does not require any severe modifications to the conventional system. The proposed process generates hydrogen and CO2. Carbon dioxide can either be utilized or sequestered by using the existing technologies. This process functions by selectively capturing CO2 from the blast furnace gas. The sorbents that can be used for the capture process can be utilized for a large number of cycles. Once the capture capacity of the sorbents degrades, the sorbent can be used in further processing. For example, the sorbents can be processed in a blast furnace for the production of iron or steel. Thus, the proposed method can advantageously reduce or even eliminate the loss of raw materials. This system and method can be more thermodynamically favorable and thus can save energy.