Capturing Carbon Dioxide from Refinery Low- and High-Pressure Streams
To help fulfill their responsibilities under the Paris agreement on climate change, governments around the world continue to introduce ever-tighter emissions controls, which leaves many refiners with a mandate to reduce their CO2 emissions substantially.
For most businesses, a mosaic of solutions will be required, including energy-efficiency initiatives, fuel switching, process optimisation and using the best-available technology. Any serious ambitions to reduce a facility’s carbon intensity are, however, likely to be spearheaded by carbon capture and storage (CCS). According to the International Energy Agency, this is a key technology for reducing CO2 emissions in carbon-intensive industrial processes and offers one of the lowest-cost ways of doing so. In today’s capital-constrained environment, however, one of the principal challenges that refiners may face is finding ways to do this economically.
This paper showcases two leading carbon-capture technologies that have established strong track records of performing this increasingly important function cost-effectively in a wide range of industries.