CO2 Capture in Cement Production and Re-use: First Step for the Optimization of the Overall Process.

Carbon Capture and Utilization (CCU) is one of the most widely studied technology to reduce anthropogenic CO 2 emissions and particularly the ones coming from power plants and cement plants which are currently among the world's main industrial sources of carbon dioxide. As a result, this study focuses on the optimization of an overall CCU process that should be applied to an oxyfuel cement plant, and including the CO 2 capture from flue gases and its purification in order to obtain a rich CO 2 stream that will be further converted into methane, methanol, or other chemically valuable compounds. To investigate the feasibility of such as process, two units (namely sour compression and cryogenic units) have been modeled and simulated on Aspen Plus software. These simulations were conducted considering flue gases compositions coming from both power and cement oxyfuel plants in order to compare their respective energy demands with regard to the CO 2 purity of the end-of-pipe product and to the CO 2 recovery of the overall process. It was observed that such process applied to simulated oxyfuel cement plant flue gases has a global CO 2 recovery range of 75.8 – 93.8% and that the CO 2 molar purity of the final stream is between 94.8 and 98.4%. This process appears to be completely applicable for the treatment of oxyfuel cement plant flue gases with CO 2 recovery and CO 2 molar purity in agreement with requirements for the chemical conversion of carbon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]