Optimising CO2 capture from industrial clusters

At the Go Net Zero Energy summit in Brussels on the 24-25^th October, research scientist Jasper Ros presented some of the work carried out as part of WP2 of the REALISE CCUS project on CO₂ capture from industrial clusters with multiple sources.

Ros and colleagues at TNO and NTNU are exploring ways to link multiple stacks in large oil refineries to the same CO₂ capture infrastructure in order to cost-effectively decrease the post-combustion emissions of a cluster.

Energy recovery strategies are crucial to sustainably integrate a carbon capture facility in a multistack oil refinery. ​Recovering residual heat from flue gases and/or using steam produced near the refinery are a couple of the approaches being tested to meet the CO₂ capture plant’s energy requirements​.

As part of the REALISE CCUS project, Ros has also been developing the Online Calculator To Optimize CO₂ capture Processes for mUltiple Stacks (OCTOPUS) tool. 

Based on input parameters of each stack, such as flue gas flow rate, CO₂ concentration and temperature, and the constraints and requirements of the site, OCTOPUS can calculate the most effective CO₂ capture solution for the whole cluster.

To illustrate the tool’s features, Ros presented a case study on a refinery with five different CO₂ sources with different CO₂ concentrations (3 – 20% vol wet basis) and gas flow rates (varying from 50000 m3/h to 500000 m3/h). OCTOPUS calculated the cost and energy demands of all the possible configurations of stacks. These results will allow industrial sites with multiple flue gas stacks to optimise CO₂ capture on their site.

The tool has a user-friendly interface and because it uses its own database, containing around 10,000 simulation results from a standard CO₂ capture plant model on CO2SIM, it can provide a set of reliable results quickly, avoiding the need to perform time-consuming simulations. 

OCTOPUS will be further improved in the coming months to include more data, such as REALISE’s optimised solvent, with public release expected in the last quarter of 2023.

“At the Go Net Zero meeting, representatives from the major oil and gas companies, which are often part of industrial clusters or refineries, showed great interest in the OCTOPUS tool and the research we are doing in the REALISE project,” said Jasper Ros, research scientist at TNO.