Advanced cryogenic processes for capture of CO2 from sour hydrocarbons mixtures

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Inglezakis, V.J. and Surmi, A. and Rahman, F. and Salihuddn, R. and Atsonios, K. (2025) Advanced cryogenic processes for capture of CO2 from sour hydrocarbons mixtures. Journal of Environmental Chemical Engineering, 13 (6). 119167. ISSN 2213-3437 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jece.2025.119167)

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Abstract

The removal of CO2 from natural gas is instrumental in reducing CO2 emissions and necessary to meet the sales gas pipeline specifications. Depending on the plant configuration, the demethanization section produces a high purity CH4 stream, CO2-rich light hydrocarbons streams and waste gases. There is a gap in the literature on the simultaneous CO2 capture and light hydrocarbons recovery from the CO2-rich light hydrocarbons streams. In this work an extractive distillation, a hybrid extractive distillation/absorption and two hybrid extractive distillation/CO2-freezing processes were developed using Aspen Plus® to achieve this dual goal and were benchmarked. The feed is a sour natural gas (43.80% mol CO2) producing a 90% mol CO2-light hydrocarbons stream. Heat integration of the developed flowsheets including refrigeration cycles is performed to evaluate the heat and power demands for each process. The results demonstrated that all processes can achieve more than 98% light hydrocarbons recovery and near to 100% CO2 capture effectiveness while achieving the pipeline specifications for both the sales gas and CO2 products. The specific energy consumption ranges from 61 kJ/mol to 147 kJ/mol (feed basis), with the hybrid extractive distillation/CO2-freezing processes being more energy efficient and the hybrid extractive distillation/absorption the most energy intensive. Several published processes were simulated and shown light hydrocarbons recovery in the range of 35-98%, CO2 capture efficiency in the range of 84-100% and energy consumption in the range of 22-97 kJ/mol. In contrast to the published processes, the novel hybrid extractive distillation/CO2-freezing processes simultaneously and more effectively achieve CO2 capture, CH4 recovery and light hydrocarbons recovery while they are competitive in terms of energy consumption. The results show that CO2 freezing is a promising option for CO2 capture and storage and light hydrocarbons recovery.

ORCID iDs

Inglezakis, V.J. ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0195-0417, Surmi, A., Rahman, F., Salihuddn, R. and Atsonios, K.;
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)