About the project
In 2015, 195 countries signed the Paris Agreement, a global commitment to limit average global temperature rise to 2°C. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it will be extremely expensive, if not impossible, to achieve the 2°C scenario without carbon capture and storage.
Carbon Capture in Molten Salts (CCMS) is developed based on a carbon capture process called Calcium Looping (CaL). However, CCMS differs from CaL by having the active substance (calcium oxide) partially dissolved in molten salts instead of in a solid-state. Dissolving the substance in molten salts has proven to have faster reaction kinetics and the absorbent is not found to degrade over cycles. This could make CCMS a more economical solution. This PhD project is a collaboration between Enestor AS and NMBU, and aims at verifying if CCMS is a process for the future of carbon capture.
CCMS has indicated a potential to capture CO2 down to 0.76vol% with promising results. However, the kinetics of the reaction is only known down to 4vol%. The accumulated emissions from sources lower than 4vol% add up to large amounts. Therefore, this project will research how efficient CCMS is for lower concentrations. Could CCMS capture CO2 efficiently from low concentration sources, making it economically viable?
Before making a large-scale carbon-capturing plant we also need to understand how to design it. Based on existing research it is found that CCMS is able to capture CO2, but it requires high temperatures (>900°C). The question is how we can generate the heat and maintain the energy to make the process as efficient as possible. Researching this will be the main part of this project. By using modelling tools and the collected data from experiments, we can simulate a plant and estimate the needed energy and size requirements. We can then use this model to predict the cost of CO2-capturing and building a large-scale plant.