Challenges of electric swing adsorption for CO2 capture

This work focuses on the application of electric swing adsorption (ESA) as a selective postcombustion technique to capture and concentrate CO2 from flue gases of power plants. The initial application should be the capture of CO2 from flue gases of combined cycle natural gas (NGCC) power plants: the CO2 content ranges from 3-5%, with up to 12% of oxygen. Several challenges to deploy this process for a large-scale application are pointed out. Materials such as amine-modified resins or zeolites should be good candidates for this process (indirect ESA) because they exhibit good loadings at low partial pressures of CO2. The process design should take into account the temperature increase due to adiabatic operation, pushing the effective loadings to values around 20% of maximum loading. Several process operations are suggested in order to improve the CO2 purity and recovery and also to integrate the ESA process with other sources of heat, which may have an important impact in energy consumption. © 2010 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.