A vision receiving serious attention for slowing the increase of CO2 emissions in the atmosphere is to capture the CO2 at large point generation sources especially electric power plants and store it in stable geological formations. Before CO2 can be sequestered, it must be separated from the other species in the power plant's flue gas which contains primarily nitrogen and water vapor, with other trace gases. Economical carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) from power plant flue gas could thus be part of the mid-term solutions to mitigate climate change while renewable energy technologies continue to be installed in the nation's power grids. This project will develop new porous materials capable of removing CO2 from flue gas, as well as process-level technology using these materials, with the long-term goal of lowering the cost and energy requirements for carbon capture. The research will also be effectively integrated into education and outreach activities, including training of graduate students in a highly interdisciplinary environment to help them to develop a broad outlook and to develop good teamwork and communication skills; recruiting of undergraduate students to the research team and pairing them with graduate student mentors; developing outreach material on the research about sustainable carbon capture; and involving underrepresented minorities in STEM and women in the forefront research area of CCS.
The premise of this project is that game-changing improvements of adsorption separation processes for CCS will require simultaneous development of new materials and specially designed processes that take advantage of these new materials. The primary objective of the research is to investigate and to develop a novel and systematic framework of integrating the design of metal-organic framework (MOF) sorbent materials and the design of adsorption processes for carbon capture in a sustainable way. The project's fundamental research will design, synthesize, and characterize new MOF materials including novel zeolitic imidazolate frameworks (ZIFs) with high selectivity for CO2 over nitrogen and water vapor, together with suitably high absolute capacity for CO2. Overcoming the effects from competitive adsorption of water will be a primary focus. Using state-of-the-art process-level modeling, the project team will optimize adsorption processes around the new class of sorbents and explore the real efficiency limits of MOF-based adsorption processes that meet desired CCS technical and economic criteria. Adsorption processes are already used in large-scale applications, such as air separation, with high reliability. Discovery of new and efficient adsorbents for CO2 capture and new, optimal process configurations for these sorbents would be a step-out development in CCS.
