Discussing opportunities presented in these circular carbon economies as part of gasworld’s ‘Europe CO2 Summit 2022‘, Andrew Baxter – CEO & President of Sustainable Energy Solutions, a Chart Company.
Getting started, Baxter elaborated on how the fusion between SES’ technology and Chart’s industry experience has helped capitalise on opportunities presented in the world of carbon capture.
Starting with advances in post-combustion carbon capture technology, Baxter explained that current technology can be split into a few different steps.
“The first one is separating the CO2 from the gases that would normally be coming out of the stack at a CO2 source like a power plant or an industrial plant, cement plant etc, and then compressing that CO2 so that it is in a high pressure, liquid, low volume or supercritical fluid where it’s ready for transportation, storage and use.”
SES’ technology pulls down the gas that would normally be going out of the stack to the point where the CO2 freezes and forms a solid.
That solid CO2 is then separated from the light gases ina post combustion application that’s mostly nitrogen and oxygen.
The CO2 stream is then warmed under pressure before going to a liquid phase.
Baxter added, “Then it’s ready for transportationand storage as a high pressure, high purity liquid.”
“The combination of this innovative process technology with Chart’s decades of experience really puts us in a good place to scale this technology up.”
Benefits of SES’ technology
Because the technology doesn’t use steam, just electricity, it can be easily retrofitted without any major changes made to the existing process.
With Net Zero/negative emissions being the goal, the company runs at a rate of over 95% capture – potentially over 99% – and producing a CO2 purity of around 99.7%.
It also supplies integrated grid scale storage, furthering the circular nature of carbon capture technology.
With the preliminary design finished, the company is set to begin operations at its newest DOE 30-300 tonnes per day (TPD) Liquid CO2 System.
Discussing SES’ relationship with Chart, Baxter said, “Chart is critical for us transitioning this technology from a developing technology to something that is now commercially ready to deploy.”
“Combining that expertise with our innovative ideas forms the perfect team to deploy this commercially.”