Process Design and Development for Carbon Dioxide Mineralization Technologies

The conversion of CO2 into mineral carbonates represents a viable large-scale solution to reduce CO2 emissions. A multitude of technologies have been proposed to accomplish this. However, to date none have been successfully scaled up or deployed at an industrially relevant scale. Numerous obstacles prevent the practical applications of CO2 mineralization technologies. The most pressing concerns are energy consumption (and therefore sequestration efficiency), material handling and end use, and process economics. While these problems can be resolved individually, it is very difficult to find a proposal that addresses all three concerns at the same time. Some of the work done in ICES to solve these issues will be shown here in this presentation, and several of the broader aspects of CO2 mineralization will be discussed as well. It will be shown that it is possible to recover some of the operating costs from the sale of valuable by-products from the mineralization process. Secondly, the energy requirements of CO2 mineralization are evaluated, and it can be seen that certain processes have a very high net CO2 sequestration efficiency. Finally, the product quantities from CO2 mineralization are definitely manageable, especially when applied to the construction and land reclamation industries. The results suggest that a viable CO2 mineralization technology or process will have to be a hybrid process that incorporates the best aspects of these solutions.