CO2 Capture from Point Sources and Air using Solid Sorbents

#CO2 #adsorption

This is a joint meeting of Canadian Society of Senior Engineers and IEEE Life Members Affinity Groups.

This series of presentations has been occurring for more than 20 years and is now being also advertised to the IEEE Northern Canada Section (NCS) Life Members Affinity Group (LMAG) through vTools and other IEEE LMAG's and IEEE members depending upon the topic.  At the same time the Canadian Society of Senior Engineers (CSSE) is using their national organization to provide information, the subject and speaker to members across Canada.

The March meeting will be held on Thursday March 21, 2024. The Meeting will open at 12:30 pm MDT (2:30pm Eastern), with the presentation starting at 12:45 (2:45pm EDT). If you plan to attend and be included on the Zoom invite for this meeting please, respond to Tom Madsen, tcmadsen@telus.net before noon on Wednesday March 20. The meeting will be held via the Zoom platform with the actual invitations sent the afternoon of Wednesday March 20. 

Please note the meeting originates in Alberta which is in the Mountain Time Zone, so if you are in another province you must account for any necessary time shift.

Presentation: CO₂ capture from point sources and air using solid sorbents

Adsorption is a mature process using microporous solids (Adsorbents) to purify gases. It is commercially used in H₂ purification, air separation, CH₄ upgrading, etc. In the last 20 years, thanks to the development of the field of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), chemists have made exceptional advances in tailoring adsorbents for a specific separation. However, despite generating hundreds of thousands of (hypothetical & real) MOFs, there has been limited practical success in this area. The talk will be presented in two parts.

Part 1: How can Engineering enable the discovery and screening of adsorbents for CO₂ capture? The excitement in chemistry has led to an implicit assumption that the key bottleneck in developing large-scale adsorption processes lies in discovering the right adsorbent. Our group was one of the first to demonstrate that any meaningful screening should consider the complexity of the process and the need to combine engineering aspects in the selection processes. We needed to develop machine-learning and experimental tools to support the discovery process. I will highlight how these developments have allowed us to rethink adsorbent screening and discovery [1,2]

Part 2. A Made-In-Canada breakthrough in CO₂ capture: The second part of the talk will deal with what has been considered a breakthrough in CO₂ capture: the first commercial-scale deployment of a MOF for industrial flue gas capture. This work published in the journal Science [3] describes Calgary Framework 20 (CALF-20), a MOF developed at the University of Calgary, characterized for wet-flue-gas CO₂ capture at the University of Alberta, understood at the molecular level by colleagues at the University of Ottawa and now commercialized by Svante, a company located in Burnaby, BC. This is considered a major development not just in CO₂ capture but also in the industrialization of MOFs. The pan-Canadian collaborative work demonstrates how technologies developed in academic labs can impact climate technologies. 

1. Rajendran, A., et al. "How can (or why should) process engineering aid the screening and discovery of solid sorbents for CO2 capture?." Accounts of Chemical Research 56.17 (2023): 2354-2365.
2. Subraveti, S.G., et al. "How much can novel solid sorbents reduce the cost of post-combustion CO2 capture? A techno-economic investigation on the cost limits of pressure–vacuum swing adsorption." Applied Energy 306 (2022): 117955.
3. Lin, J-B, et al. "A scalable metal-organic framework as a durable physisorbent for carbon dioxide capture." Science 374, no. 6574 (2021): 1464-1469.