【Ten Years of Rapid Development in Chemical Equipment】From 2017 to 2022, the independently developed carbon capture solvent PC-1 underwent industrial testing

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This post was last edited by Desert Fish on 2023-1-2 at 23:15. Watching the ten-year development of chemical processing equipment, I admire the prosperity and strength of modern China. Wishing everyone a happy New Year, and peace and health for all family members. This is just a starting point; more participation from everyone will make things more lively. Haichuan becomes even better with you all here; we welcome more people to participate in discussions on this forum. ------------------------------------------------------------------On December 1, 2022, the solvent PC-1, independently developed by the Carbon Capture team at the Petroleum and Chemical Research Institute, successfully completed its industrial trials at the Golmud Refinery. The absorption and desorption properties of the new solvent have been significantly improved, addressing the problem of rising costs caused by the oxidative degradation and uncontrolled corrosion of the solvent in an oxygen-containing flue gas environment. Under the condition of processing 50,000 cubic meters of gas with complex components per hour, the purity of carbon dioxide remains stable at over 99.7%, and the operational efficiency of the new solvent is 20% higher than that of traditional amines; cost savings of over 20% are expected. Carbon capture technology is the first step in carbon dioxide capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) technology; its purpose is to separate carbon dioxide from gases with complex compositions, so that it can be reused or stored underground. However, a series of issues in domestic carbon capture, such as small technical scale, low heat exchange efficiency, and high capture costs, have severely hindered the large-scale development of the CCUS industry. To this end, the Petrochemical Research Institute focused on low-cost capture as the key to technological innovation; by utilizing AI-based quantum chemistry calculation techniques to explore formulations from chemical solvent libraries, it developed a new generation of absorption solvent PC-1. This solvent enables an increase in processing capacity while reducing the size and footprint of the equipment, thereby significantly cutting down capture costs. It is reported that the second phase of testing for the PC-1 solvent, namely the scale-up test of the hypergravity desorption reactor, will begin next April. During this phase, the compatibility of the PC-1 solvent with the new reactor, its long-term performance, the improvement in desorption efficiency, and the ability to reduce desorption energy consumption will be primarily tested.