[en] Hard-to-abate industries such as lime production emit significant amounts of CO2 from both limestone calcination and fuel combustion. Oxy-fuel combustion is a promising mitigation route because replacing air with high-purity oxygen produces a flue gas mainly composed of CO2 and H2O, thereby simplifying downstream capture and reducing separation costs. However, captured CO2 must meet stringent transport specifications regarding purity, residual O2, NOx, SO2 and moisture, while maintaining high recovery rates and acceptable energy consumption. Most studies in the literature investigate gas cleaning, dehydration and cryogenic purification separately, without fully accounting for the interactions among these process steps. This work presents a techno-economic assessment of an integrated CO2 purification unit (CPU) designed for an oxy-fuel lime kiln. The process combines an alkaline DeSOx scrubber using diluted NaOH for SO2 removal and gas cooling, a temperature swing adsorption (TSA) unit with silica gel for deep dehydration (<1 ppm H2O), and an advanced cryogenic section comprising multi-stage compression, DeNOx absorption column with liquid CO2, partial liquefaction, a DeOx column for oxygen removal, and a membrane stage to enhance CO2 recovery. The complete process chain is modeled using rate-based and dynamic approaches and optimized for flue gas compositions representative of air ingress. Across inlet compositions (48–91 mol% CO2), transport-grade CO2 is achieved, with final purity exceeding 99.99 mol%, O2 below 10 ppm, NOx below 1.5 ppm, SO2 below 2 ppm and H2O below 1 ppm. Under optimized conditions, overall CO2 recovery reaches 95% through membrane recycling. The total CO2 purification cost decreases from 65 to 30 €/tCO2 when inlet CO2 concentration increases from 48 to 91 mol%, corresponding to a 54% reduction. The CPU is the dominant contributor to the overall economics, accounting for more than 75% of total cost. These results identify air ingress control as a key lever for improving the technical and economic performance of the CO2 capture chain for an oxy-fuel lime kiln.
Disciplines :
Chemical engineering
Author, co-author :
Costa, Alexis ; Université de Mons - UMONS > Faculté Polytechnique > Service de Thermodynamique, Physique mathématiques
Chenoy, Louise ; Université de Mons - UMONS > Faculté Polytechnique > Service de Thermodynamique, Physique mathématiques
Houzé, Adrien ; Université de Mons - UMONS > Faculté Polytechnique > Service de Thermodynamique, Physique mathématiques
Laurent, Simon ; Université de Mons - UMONS > Faculté Polytechnique > Service de Thermodynamique, Physique mathématiques
Thomas, Diane ; Université de Mons - UMONS > Faculté Polytechnique > Service de Génie des Procédés chimiques et biochimiques
De Weireld, Guy ; Université de Mons - UMONS > Faculté Polytechnique > Service de Thermodynamique, Physique mathématiques
Language :
English
Title :
Towards sustainable lime production: Advanced CO2 purification unit (CPU) for oxy-fuel combustion applied to hard-to-abate industries
F505 - Génie des Procédés chimiques et biochimiques F506 - Thermodynamique, Physique mathématiques
Research institute :
R200 - Institut de Recherche en Energie
Funders :
European Commission Walloon Public Service
Funding text :
Wallonia is warmly acknowledged for the funding of the BUTTERFLY project in the framework of the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), initiated and financed by the European Union. The authors would like to gratefully acknowledge Carmeuse SA for providing the pilot-scale data used in this work.
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