Carbon capture and utilisation has seen major advances over the past year in terms of technological innovation and adoption.
Leading the sales of large-scale and strategic industrial gas projects at Pentair, Lyhne is responsible for developing and coordinating global projects and implementing new technologies for alternative and reliable feed gas sources.
Lyhne elaborated on the demand of the merchant CO2 market, revealing that it’s estimated up to 25 million tonnes per year that makes up the entire merchant CO2 market size.
He explained that there are two main ways of turning waste into revenue streams: biogas upgrading solutions and carbon capture solutions.
For biogas upgrading, he explained that Pentair’s biogas upgrading methods utilises membrane gas separation and advanced amine technology (AAT).
“This works in a relatively simple way. The compressed raw biogas is pressed through the membranes and will separate the CO2.”
“The CO2 comes out of the membrane as a high purity CO2 source.”
With more than 350 AAT plants in operation, Pentair uses the technology to capture CO2 through a solvent from flue gas.
Moving on to medium-purity methods, he explained Pentair’s FlashCO2 technology, saying, “FlashCO2 allows CO2 capture from PSA (pressure swing adsorption) off-gasses with. Medium rich CO2, eliminating the requirement for steam stripping.”
New developments
“We have recently started up a plant at Tata Chemicals in Norwich, UK,” said Lyhne.
“It’s the first industrial scale carbon capture and utilisation (CCU) plant in the UK and can capture 40,000 tonnes of CO2 from flue gases from an on-site gas fired CHP (combined heat and power) plant, resulting in an 11% carbon reduction.”
“The second project is ARC in Copenhagen where Pentair and ARC have been cooperating for net zero carbon capture,” he added.
A pilot plant has been completed with a demonstration plant to be installed this year (2022).
Following the operation’s commencement, it is planned to capture 500,000 tonnes of CO2 per year.
Progression in CO2 and is carbon capture doing enough?
“I certainly believe we are standing at a point where we are going in a different direction,” said Lyhne, with regards to sourcing of CO2.
When asked if carbon capture is doing enough o capture CO2, Lyhne admits that it’s still an expensive way of capturing the gas and the capacity of these plants are still very small.
“I believe that in the future we will see such plants replacing what we call the combustion based units, which are plants that are burning fossil fuels for the purpose of basically extracting the CO2.”
“It will come but I think it will be sometime in the future,” he concluded.