Summary Report of the Reactive CO2 Capture: Process Integration for the New Carbon Economy Workshop
- National Renewable Energy Lab. (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)
- Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
- Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
- National Energy Technology Lab. (NETL), Pittsburgh, PA, and Morgantown, WV (United States)
- US Department of Energy (USDOE), Washington DC (United States)
Decarbonization of our global economy is required to limit planetary warming to +1.5⁰C above pre-industrial levels, an ambitious goal set into motion by the Paris agreement. Given the scale and urgency, the solution demands international, cross-sector advancements spanning policy, social responsibility, and technology, with emphasis on step changes over incremental changes. To that end, technological revolutions that disrupt the status quo need to be envisioned and enacted. One potential technological revolution is the production of fuels, chemicals, and materials from carbon dioxide (CO2) as the starting feedstock, leveraging renewable energy as the driving force. Over the past decades, significant research, development, and deployment has occurred on technologies for capturing CO2 from point sources or the air and utilizing this CO2 as a working fluid or as a chemical reactant; however, most of this work has been siloed in these two categories. Recently, an emerging field has started to explore the direct integration of CO2 capture and conversion technologies as a means to reduce overall energy demand (i.e., avoid energy penalty of CO2 desorption/regeneration of capture media) and capital expense through process intensification. This strategy represents an opportunity to leapfrog forward this technological revolution. However, the field is in its infancy and the technologies are at an early stage of development, thus it is critically important to define and assess the value proposition of this strategy relative to alternatives (e.g., separated capture and conversion technologies, fuels and chemicals derived from renewable feedstocks like biomass, and industrial electrification) to chart a path forward. To identify next steps, we organized a workshop titled “Reactive CO2 Capture: Process Integration for the New Carbon Economy” which was held in Golden, Colorado, February 18–19, 2020. The focus of this workshop was to discuss approaches for merging CO2 capture and CO2 conversion/utilization systems into what we denoted as an integrated "reactive capture" strategy. By our definition, reactive capture of CO2 is the coupled process of capturing CO2 from a mixed gas stream and converting it into a valuable product without going through a purified CO2 intermediate (see full definition in the Introduction section). This report seeks to summarize feedback from the approximately 125 participants and subject matter experts in attendance from academia, industry, U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), and DOE national laboratories. The workshop agenda is included in Appendix A and the full list of attendees can be found in Appendix B. To elucidate a path forward, we first asked the attendees to define what success would look like for reactive capture in the short term (0–5 years), midterm (5–10 years), and long term (10+ years) and then asked them to answer four questions related to how we could achieve that success: (1) What are the key barriers and challenges to success? (2) What are needed activities to overcome barriers and challenges? (3) What opportunities will arise from these activities? (4) What is a target outcome and what metrics need to be met?
- Research Organization:
- National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), Pittsburgh, PA, Morgantown, WV, and Albany, OR (United States); National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Golden, CO (United States); Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Fossil Energy (FE)
- OSTI ID:
- 1815381
- Report Number(s):
- DOE/NETL-2021/2790; NREL/TP-5100-78466; LBNL-2001370
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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Summary Report of the Reactive CO2 Capture: Process Integration for the New Carbon Economy Workshop, February 18-19, 2020
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Fri Aug 13 00:00:00 EDT 2021
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OSTI ID:1814138