Assessment of CO2 capture technologies in cement manufacturing process

In this paper, an assessment of the viability of 3 CO2 capture technologies for the cement industry is performed; post-combustion absorptive capture (MEA) and oxy-combustion options are concepts already used by other industries and currently explored by the power sector; calcium looping post-combustion capture technology (CL) is an emerging technology that has not been assessed before in a comparative manner. The comparison is carried out in terms of specific energy consumption, CO2 footprint, CO2 capture energy penalty, raw material consumption and energy recovery potential. This has been achieved through the modelling of the integration of these process concepts with a reference cement plant. The results show that for the same capture efficiency (85%), calcium looping has an advantage as the specific energy consumption increases by 18%. In the case of MEA the increase is 45%. CL also has considerably higher energy recovery potential, which can also further reduce its CO2 footprint. However, chemical looping demonstrates a higher complexity of integration with an existing cement plant. Oxy-combustion, though showing lower capture efficiency (60%), results in lower specific energy consumption than the base case cement plant, which results to a negative CO2 capture penalty. These results contribute to the identification of the most suitable CO2 reducing strategy for the cement industry.