The photo is sourced theconversation.com
As of today, a total of 68 CCUS facilities operate worldwide, with an aggregate capacity of 39 million tons of CO2 per year. McKinsey expects the capacity of facilities brought into operation to rise above 60 million tons of CO2 per year by 2025, and to exceed 500 million tons of CO2 per year by 2030, including through projects that have not yet been implemented. Overall, 39 projects are currently under construction, and another 533 projects are looking for investors and technologies (although not all of them will be completed by 2030).
CCUS could become especially popular in the cement industry, which essentially has no other alternative methods of carbon footprint reduction. For example, Norway’s Norcem plans to launch a carbon capture and storage unit at its cement plant in the town of Brevik by 2024. The unit with a capacity of 400,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year will carry out multi-stage technological processes. The exhaust gases from cement production will first be purified from sulfur dioxide and cooled from 100 degrees Celsius to 30 degrees Celsius. The purified gas will be sent to an absorber partially filled with a monoethanolamine solvent, which will absorb the CO2. After that, the carbon dioxide-enriched solution will be pumped into a desorber where the mixture will be heated to 120 degrees to separate CO2 from the monoethanolamine molecules. Finally, at the last stage, the extracted CO2 will be liquefied for storage and transportation.
There is also great potential for CO2 use in the electric power industry at not only coal-fired power plants, but also at biomass power stations, which produce more emissions than all other renewable energy sources. For instance, Drax plans to put into operation a CCUS unit at a biomass power station in North Yorkshire (UK) by 2027. The unit will capture carbon dioxide with the help of two industrial columns lined from the inside with metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), crystalline porous materials consisting of metal ions bound together by organic molecules. One can place molecules of external compounds inside the MOFs and later extract them when the temperature changes. The two columns will alternate in absorbing CO2 from flue gas and later, also by turns, heat up to desorb it.
The implementation of CCUS technology might also affect other industries, including hydrogen production, where CO2 capture can reduce the carbon footprint of steam methane reforming; the steel industry, where the key method of reducing emissions so far has been the transition to the use of electric smelting furnaces that do not require coal use; and, finally, the production of chemicals and petroleum products, which could become a growth point for CCUS. It is no coincidence that an industrial zone near the city of Houston, which is home to several dozen petrochemical and refining enterprises, could become one of the world’s largest CO2 capture hubs.
McKinsey estimates that global investments in CCUS could reach $175 billion per year by 2035, which is commensurate with current global investments in coal mining ($148 billion in 2023, according to an estimate by the International Energy Agency).
