A Quantitative Investigation of CO2 Sequestration by Mineral Carbonation

TL;DR

This paper quantitatively analyzes the energy consumption of mineral carbonation for CO2 sequestration in large power plants, highlighting current methods' limitations and their impracticality for effective long-term carbon storage.

Contribution

It provides a detailed quantitative assessment of energy requirements for mineral carbonation in coal and natural gas power plants, revealing current sequestration techniques are not yet viable.

Findings

Sequestration is highly energy intensive.

Current methods are not feasible for large-scale deployment.

Mineral carbonation requires significant additional energy.

Abstract

Anthropogenic activities have led to a substantial increase in carbon dioxide (CO2), a greenhouse gas (GHG), contributing to heightened concerns of global warming. In the last decade alone CO2 emissions increased by 2.0 ppm/yr. globally. In the year 2009, United States and China contributed up to 43.4% of global CO2 emissions. CO2 capture and sequestration have been recognized as promising solutions to mitigate CO2 emissions from fossil fuel based power plants. Typical techniques for carbon capture include post-combustion capture, pre-combustion capture and oxy-combustion capture, which are under active research globally. Mineral carbonation has been investigated as a suitable technique for long term storage of CO2. Sequestration is a highly energy intensive process and the additional energy is typically supplied by the power plant itself. This leads to a reduction in net amount of CO2 captured because of extra CO2 emitted. This paper presents a quantitative analysis of the energy consumption during sequestration process for a typical 1GW pulverized coal and a 1GW natural gas based power plant. Furthermore, it has been established that the present day sequestration methods and procedures are not viable to achieve the goal of carbon sequestration.